It will surprise no one to say that the United States faces a stark choice this November in its choice of President, and that the nation is in a precarious state, with an election season and process that is quite unlike any in memory. There is no need to name the protagonists; we know who they are.
There have been many challenging times since the American Civil War, but not many in which there was so little political stability, and in which the population was so cloven apart as it is now.
Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, would comprehend what has happened. He would tell us that we, the people, have fallen under the power of the shadow, that dark part of our unconscious – the collective unconscious in this case – as the Germans once did, in the 1930’s. Hitler’s power was not political, Jung claimed; rather it was magic. It was magic because its power derives from the unconscious and the shadow. (i)
In Jungian psychology, among the archetypes – those primordial images or psychic energies hard-wired into the unconscious of human beings – there is the powerful archetype of the “King.” It could just as well be the “Queen”; (ii) in either case it is the Leader who provides order and stability for the nation. The good King embodies reasonability, responsibility, rational patterns of action, integrity and honest purpose – not just demonstrating these on behalf of the people, but, rather, integrating these, so that he lives them in his own life and persona. With both firmness and kindness, he affirms deserving others, and in doing so creates a “fertilizing” calm and centeredness within which the people can flourish and become their best selves. The King serves – not himself – but the people and the earth. He mirrors and embodies the best intentions of people, and thereby fosters harmony and creative opportunity for the folk to grow and develop. (iii) Because of his service, there is mostly peace in the land as people go about the business of providing for families, prospering, and developing their best selves.
But there are times, when the conditions are right, wherein the “Shadow King” emerges. The conditions that allow the him to emerge are times in which the shadow itself – a dark part of character that has potential for destructiveness, the hiding place of repressed and often enough, negative energies (iv) – has emerged from the collective unconscious of the people. (v) The Shadow King is both a reflection of dark forces, and an instigator of those same forces in the population.
The Shadow King is bipolar; he exhibits characteristics of both the tyrant and the weakling. Far from calm and generative, he embodies hatred and fear, and will actively incite those feelings in others. His “degradation of others knows no bounds,” because he “hates all beauty, all innocence, all strength, all talent, all life energy.” This happens because he has no “inner structure” of an assured and serene self, and is terrified of “his own hidden weakness and his underlying lack of potency.” (vi)
The land and the people cannot flourish under the Shadow King. His unrelenting assaults on people’s hopes, interests and talents, his constant deprecation of others, his promulgation of falsehoods, and the relentless self-promotion of his own interests will ensure confusion. Disorder will prevail. The people will become divided and fall into open conflict with one another. The quality of public discourse will degrade. Winning, rather than compromise and accommodation for all, will become the goal. Everyday problems will fail to be addressed. Feelings and actions will become more aggressive toward one another. Paranoid ideas of conspiracy will spread among the population. The Shadow King will draw out previously hidden fears and hatreds in the populace; he will provide legitimacy and a forum for these violent impulses. And because the Shadow King is extremely sensitive to criticism, when challenged, he will become threatening; at the slightest provocation, what the people will see is rage – the rage of a toddler, in fact.
And that latter is the most revealing of the underlying problem: the psychological problem of arrested development, the rage of the immature self, the inherent inadequacy of the personality frozen in childhood narcissism, ultimately lacking the development of a normal human conscience.
This is where we are, in America. For reasons that are deep in the collective psyche and history of the nation, we have elected the Shadow King, and mired in a projection of our own unconscious, are considering whether to elect him once more. Most frightening, it is not entirely clear what choice we will make.
It is not such a surprise that the Shadow King has been elevated to leadership in America at this time. America, that sunny, Enlightenment-founded and forward-seeking society, drags behind it a very long bag of shadow material, dating back to its origins in patriarchy and plutocracy, along with the ownership of African human beings as property, and the attempted genocide of the Indigenous People. As well-meaning as the country has been, there have been no true efforts at public national reconciliation of these things, so of course, it all remains in the collective unconscious, and stays as a toxin within an otherwise noble experiment. (More on that another time.)
But also, it is no coincidence that the election of the Shadow King directly followed the presidency of a man of colour, a person of partial African descent. Though he was not the descendent of American slaves, in the collective psyche he represented that, and he had a foreign-sounding name, and these were intolerable for much of the population. Then followed the near election of a woman as President, a person who, although not without flaws, was strong, experienced, and forceful. She won most of the votes of the people – but was prevented from assuming the role of Queen by that remnant of the patriarchal, plutocratic system, the Electoral College.
This all follows a principle of a certain kind of “social physics,” we might call it, where for every social action, there is an opposing, equal reaction. Progressive social steps will stimulate their opposites. Thus, the good King of partial African descent and the near election of a strong Queen was followed by a rejection of all that and by the ascension of a hyper-masculine, misogynistic, supremacist Shadow King.
Of course, not all people accepted this – particularly women did not. For the most part, they knew exactly what they saw before them. They precisely knew who had been elected. They took to the streets, in millions, all over the country, wearing their pink “pussy-hats,” warning the rest of us of what was to come.
And so now: the election of 2020 is upon us. One option is to affirm the leadership of the Shadow King.
The other option is choosing a good, if humanly imperfect King. He is a person with compassion for others, one who eaten more than one full meal of the ashes of his own grief, and therefore is sensitive to the grief and longings of others. He is one who has known failure along with success; one who knows that it is human to stumble, and human again to pick oneself up. He is one who admits and understands his mistakes, and so not only learns from them, but also is willing to help others adjust themselves and move toward integrity and growth.
There are days that I think we are at the point of no return as a nation. I admit that I am afraid of what we will do. Our election choice not mysterious, not cloudy. On the one hand, on the ballot is the Shadow King. We have the experience of him and know what that is and what the future will be if we allow his leadership to continue.
On the other hand, on the ballot is the ordinary, the human, the good King. We do not yet have the experience of this person as King; but we do know very well who he is, and we know his long service to the nation.
The choice is as stark, and as telling, as it could be.
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(i) Knickerbocker, Hubert R. Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? (Omnibook Magazine, February 1942). Retrieved from “Old Magazine Articles,” http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/carl_jung_studied_hitler#.Wfi00hNSy-U.
(ii) I will use the “King” here, but it could just as well be “Queen.” For our purposes, gender, although it plays out powerfully in American public life, is not the issue in the present discussion. I use “King” simply because both candidates currently are male, and America has not yet found itself willing to elect a “Queen.”
(iii) Moore, Robert, and Douglas Gillette. King Warrior Magician Lover (HarperOne, 1990), 49 – 74.
(iv) Johnson, Robert A. Owning Your Own Shadow (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 4.
(v) The Shadow is not made entirely of destructive energy; it can also include more positive energies, such as exuberant and creative impulses that are put away – stuffed into the “long bag” – as a result of social conditioning, particularly in childhood. See Bly, Robert. A Little Book on the Human Shadow (HarperOne, 1988), 17 – 26.
(vi) Moore and Gillette, King Warrior Magician Lover. 64.