Jeff Russell

Thank you for your kind words! I am lucky enough to be able to catch up on stuff like reading right now, as I teach at a university and we're out for the summer, so I have some more flexibility in my daytime schedule, and my tastes being what they are, that mostly gets filled with reading!

As for the Shadow and the risk, sure, that's a concern. Jung and most of his disciples talk about the difference between "repression" and "sublimation," which is fairly easy to grasp in theory, but strikes me as much harder to pin down in practice. The basic idea is that repression is when you take unwanted thoughts, feelings, urges, or whatever, and shove them down before they even really register consciously, such that your ego can convince itself they never even really came up. Sublimation is where you have some degree of consciousness of your potentially-shadowy thoughts/feelings/etc, and instead decide to do something more healthy with them - maybe you realize the reason you want to scream at the poor clerk helping you is because you feel trapped in a dead-end job, and so you walk home with a new sense of purpose and go file some job applications.

Where I get hung up, though, is in distinguishing between some of the more "direct" methods of sublimation and just plain wallowing in potentially unhealthy patterns - for example, say you start channeling your rage into death metal, or drawings of extreme violence, or whatever. At what point does helpfully processing your darker feelings stop and feeding unhealthy patterns begin? As usual, I suppose that self-awareness is the true answer, so any practices that help with that ought to be good.

Anyhow, that's all a long way of saying that there is certainly some risk in engaging with your Shadow, but I think most Jungians would say that hiding from it doesn't make it go away - it just makes it show up in unexpected ways that you might not notice. Whatever you end up deciding to do (or not), good luck!

Cheers,
Jeff