A stub from an article by Edward C. Whitmont. The full text can be found here:

http://www.usfca.edu/fromm/handouts%20spring%202009/tuesday/Garrett/Whitmont,%20garret%20wk%204.pdf

Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics — a self-description which is utterly unconscious and which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effect from the other person. These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side: only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others. Negative qualities which do not bother us so excessively. which we find relatively easy to forgive — if we have to forgive them at all—are not likely to pertain to our shadow.

The shadow is the archetypal experience of the "other fellow." who in his strangeness is always suspect. It is the archetypal urge for a scapegoat, for someone to blame and attack in order to vindicate oneself and be justified; it is the archetypal experience of the enemy. the experience of blameworthiness which always adheres to the other fellow, since we are under the illusion of knowing ourselves and of having already dealt adequately with our own problems. In other words. to the extent that I have to he right and good. he, she, or they become the carriers of all the evil which I fail to acknowledge within myself.

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Thanks Kristi. When we begin to understand our shadow we begin to open doors to the deepest aspects of who we are as individuals. This article provides great insights to those qualities.

Jerry

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