Why Shadow Work Fails

I have posted multiple articles here on Augoeides discussing errors in the psychoanalytic model that have been revealed by modern neuroscience research. It should come as no surprise that a model of the mind from a century ago would turn out to be incorrect and superceded by newer and better science. Nonetheless, in the magical community a lot of writing about psychology seems to be stuck at some point around the 1920's. This is especially true of Thelema, in which the use of Jungian psychology is practically a cliche. Some examples of this are David Shoemaker's Living Thelema, which devotes a full third of the book to Jungian principles. As a personal example, at the last NOTOCON I attended a presentation on alchemy that sounded fascinating from the description of the talk, but basically turned out to be a walk-through of Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, which I read back in college when working on my psychology degree. It was published in 1944.

One area in which I will give Carl Jung credit is that he took Freud's psychoanalytic model about as far as anyone ever could. The problem is that the Jungian version preserves all of Freud's original errors and tries to build its foundation on top of them. I should point out that prior to neuroscience findings on the nature of memory, I considered myself an enthusiastic Jungian. This thesis that I wrote back in 1991 considers the idea of using chaos theory to model Jungian personality structures in order to generate a functional and predictive model of the mind. The central idea is a logical conclusion that can be drawn from the self-similar nature of Jungian complexes, but falls apart when we realize that the Jungian complex does not exist in any real sense. It is an abstraction that rests on the incorrect notion of conflating the brain's conditioning and cognitive systems.

According to the Jungian model, the mind consists of complexes all the way down. A complex is defined as collection of impressions, memories, ideas, and so forth linked together into a unified structure according to similar feeling-tone. Feeling-tone is a term that describes the subjective experience of an emotion connected with an impression, memory, or idea. Jung considered the Freudian ego as a sort of "master complex" united by the feeling-tone of self-identification. In other words, all of the impressions, memories, and ideas surrounding our sense of self combine to create the sense of self-awareness and subjective consciousness. This implies that complexes gain self-awareness once they reach a critical mass of elements, and that implication is a key aspect of the Jungian model not found in Freud or Adler or any of the other psychoanalytic systems that preceded it. In Jungian psychology, the actions of non-ego (and therefore unconscious) complexes play an important role in producing mental illness symptoms.

What we actually know now from brain research is that the phenomena Jung attributed to the actions of unconscious, autonomous complexes actually arises in the conditioning system, a portion of the brain that is present in virtually all animals, from human beings to the Aplysia sea slug that has only twenty thousand total neurons. This system is in many ways a marvel of evolution in terms of simplicity and efficiency. It runs on a small rule set and implements "conditioning loops" that prompt the repetition of behaviors that have been reinforced and the avoidance of behaviors that have been punished or resulted in negative reinforcement. It essentially builds up a "database" of these behaviors, their results, and the situation in which they occurred. It does not think, it does not reason, and it does not "want" anything. None of its processing remotely resembles conscious cognition, and in fact that processing is done by a completely different part of the brain from that employed by the thinking and feeling systems.

I sometimes get characterized as skeptical towards the entire notion of unconscious brain processing, and that is not true. What I am skeptical towards is the idea of an "unconscious mind." This is because, while the conditioning system does unconscious processing, it in no way resembles what we consider a mind. It behaves much more like a machine, deterministically executing conditioning loops in response to specific situations that resemble previous experiences. Jung's idea was that conditioning loops were essentially made of memory impressions glommed together to the extent that they could operate with a sort of volition and essentially hijack the conscious mind. The error lies in the concept that all cognitive material is "the same" in some meaningful sense, so that your "ego" - one complex among many, albeit a very strong one - could in theory integrate the material that comprises the loop and thus neutralize its ability to operate independently.

This is an incredibly convoluted model that was created in reponse to the apparent complexity of conditioning loops, but as B. F. Skinner showed in the 1960's the conditioning system does not require anything but a set of simple rules to produce complexity. It is created by the nature of the environment itself as we interact with it throughout our lives. Problems arise when conditioning loops no longer represent an appropriate response to our surroundings and lead to suboptimal behavior. A behavior that was reinforced at the age of five is almost certainly the wrong thing to do at the age of twenty-five. Your conditioning system does not understand that, though, because it has nothing resembling awareness, let alone time-bound awareness. It just recognizes a situation that you experienced as a child, and prompts the behavior that drew a reward all the way back then.

According to the Jungian model, "the shadow" is another large complex that is the opposite of the "ego complex." Whereas the ego is built on the feeling-tone of self-identification, the shadow is built on the feeling-tone of self-rejection and/or self-denial. As such, the material it contains are those things about yourself that exist within your sphere of consciousness that you reject and/or disapprove of. "Shadow work" in the Jungian sense consists of identifying with this rejected material so as to integrate it back into the ego complex. An unintegrated shadow, like all large complexes, allegedly has its own awareness, volition, goals, and so forth. The Jungian perspective on self-destructive behavior is that your shadow is essentially acting in opposition to your ego, and consequences that seem bad from the ego perspective are actually what the shadow - a part of you - secretly wants. That's where it all falls apart in the real world.

Remember back when I was talking about the inadequacies of New Thought? To summarize, New Thought is a philosophy that contends your thoughts deterministically control everything you experience. If you are walking down the street and somebody mugs you, that means you must have been thinking thoughts of being mugged. On the surface New Thought seems empowering - you control the world with your thoughts! - but is also leads to a form of perverse victim blaming when bad things happen. Your thoughts were not pure enough, so you need to work harder and you can only blame yourself for what happened. Even though the world is full of billions of other people, all with their own thoughts and their own motivations. When another person hurts you, it makes a lot more sense to take into account that a lot more is going on there than just the thoughts you were thinking at the time.

Incidentally, the idea that you can influence the world with your thoughts is also found in magick, but in a precise form that lays out degrees of statistical effects rather than deterministic control. The deterministic model is silly if you look at measured magical results. When you push the physical world, it pushes back and limits the shift you can create. If it was your thoughts all the way down, no such limitations would exist and magical effects would scale indefinitely. I am not sure what such a world would look like. Maybe some sort of urban fantasy universe with dueling wizards throwing around world-breaking spells on a daily basis? Some sort of real-life Dungeons and Dragons campaign complete with fireballs, lightning bolts, and meteor swarms doled out at will? Whatever the case, it should be clear that this is not the world we live in.

The idea of the shadow leads to a similar problem as found in New Thought. If your shadow, and not your conditioning, is the root of self-destructive behavior, the effect is like having a relentless enemy stationed in your own mind that is in some sense "you" in the same way that the ego is you, but which at the same time stays hidden from your conscious cognition. That strikes me as a recipe for debilitating paranoia and blaming yourself for every bad thing that happens to you, whether it makes any sense for you to be at fault or not. Accountability for your actions is all fine and good, and if the empirical evidence supports that you are to blame in a particular situation, so be it. But you are not accountable for everything that happens to you. Other play a role there and so does your society as a whole. It makes no sense to blame all that on "the shadow," as if the solution to the problem of evil were some sort of internal bogeyman.

Psychoanalysis should have been collapsed by research findings on memory during about the last twenty years. Freud believed that memory was stored with perfect accuracy, and that the reason we do not remember everything is that a "repression mechanism" prevents us from doing so. Jung took that idea further, and posited that this repression mechanism is the exact thing that creates the shadow, making it in effect a repository of rejected - that is, repressed - cognitive material. The repression mechanism results in the ego being only one component of the mind, the tip of a vast iceberg of unconscious material. But all of this is wrong. There is no active repression mechanism, memories just fade and lose details over time if you do not happen to think about them. Every time we recall something, the brain reconstructs the full memory from a handful of fixed "touchpoints," meaning that the details themselves are not stored and can shift over time.

No repression, no unconscious mind as we understand "mind." No unconscious mind, no shadow - and no ego, at least as psychoanalysts understand it. A more correct model of the mind is the subjective awareness of the operation of three primary systems. The thinking system handles declarative information - the "about" in the question "What are you thinking about?" The feeling system handles emotional states, the answer to the question "How are you feeling?" These two systems together represent the conscious mind, and there are no secret enemies or hidden motivations to be found anywhere. The third system is conditioning system, which is entirely unconscious because it lacks the capacity for any form of self-awareness. It arises from an older part of the brain than the thinking and feeling systems, and can prompt behaviors, thoughts, and emotions by signalling the other two systems. When the signal is received by either one, the impulse becomes conscious.

Thus, the concept of shadow work in the Jungian sense is entirely pointless. There is no "shadow material" to integrate with your "ego material." It is not just the division that makes no sense, it is also the entire functional framework. It should come as no surprise that following a nonsensical method leads to ineffectual results. Trying to artificially personify things you reject about yourself seems like a lot of effort that will lead to disappointing results. Taking on blame for "secretly wanting" the bad things that happen to you strikes me as flat-out toxic, like entering into an abusive relationship with the universe. Neither of those sounds like good mental health to me. While it is true that identifying as a victim is rarely helpful, it is also true in many cases that whether you accept or reject that identity does not change the empirical fact that you were victimized by someone else.

Despite all this, magicians should understand that some of the practices that come out of shadow work can be useful. First, cultivate accurate self-knowledge. Observe your behavior as objectively as you can, without judgment, until you have a clear understanding of your nature. From there, you can evaluate what to work on in order to become a better person, however you define better. Second, work to eliminate negative self-talk and "beating up on yourself," both in your thoughts and your actions. You should always be your own best advocate, because as we all know no one else will. This is entirely compatible with working to be better, since reinforcement is far more effective than punishment in the context of conditioning. Telling yourself how awesome you are when you do things right goes a lot further towards self-improvement than telling yourself how awful you are whenever you make a mistake.

The third and final practice associated with shadow work that is actually helpful is overcoming shame. Shame is a form of negative self-judgment that has a lot in common with negative self-talk and self-hatred in general. This is almost always the result of the conditioning system going haywire and signalling your feeling system. This prompts a negative emotional response towards aspects of your own personality and/or behavior. This is often little more than meaningless social conditioning. For example, a person who is gay may have grown up in a conservative religious family, and as a result be conditioned to feel shame surrounding their sexual orientation. Shame is at its most useless when it is applied to personal qualities like this that cause no harm to anyone else. I would also argue, though, that shame is only useful to the extent that it prompts action. If you break your word to someone and feel ashamed of doing so, the remedy is not to wallow in the shame. The remedy is to take the action of being true to your word going forward.

Otherwise, though, the "integration of shadow material" is meaningless because you don't really have a separate ego and shadow, or a separate conscious and unconscious mind. You have a mind that can be affected by unconscious processing that runs along essentially mechanical lines. The real key practice is understanding what conditioning loops are being run so you can (A) recognize them and (B) recondition them. Conditioning loops eventually subside due to a process called extinction, but this is a very slow process to rely on for personal change. A better practice is to place yourself in a situation where the conditioning loop activates, resist the behavior it is prompting, and instead behave the way you want to. The moment you complete that behavior, reward yourself to recondition the loop. This can be something subjective like telling yourself how awesome you are, or better still some simple physical reward like eating a piece of candy.

When you practice this way you are working with what the conditioning system is really doing, rather than piling a bunch of abstractions about motivation on top of a fundamentally basic biological process. The most ironic thing about both the Jungian and New Thought models is that while they can help in terms of dealing with shame and guilt from our early lives, they set up a whole new form of shame and guilt when they effectively blame us for everything bad that happens to us. This is not accountability, it's superstition. Positive thinking does aid success, since it provides motivation in situations where the deck seems stacked against you. Unraveling old, maladaptive programming does help us to avoid self-sabotage. But neither of these methods are infallible or deterministic and New Agers who pretend otherwise are doing themselves no facors. As any magician will tell you, magick is probabilistic and sometimes just doesn't work, even if you are doing everything right.

I'm going to belabor this point a bit because I find that sometimes the statistical point is hard to grasp. Let's say that you are trying to accomplish something with a low percentage chance of success - like, say, 1 in 1000. Really effective magicians can overcome odds of about 1 in 100. So if you are one of these magicians and employ your magical power to succeed at this task, you divide one by the other to yield odds of 1 in 10. This is strong probability shift. But your odds of failure are still 90%. The magick "succeeds" in the sense that it shifts the odds in a highly significant way. But you still won't succeed at your goal 9 times out of 10, even with that level of magical assistance. A person using a less disciplined method like New Age "manifesting" probably won't even be able to hit that 100 to 1 shift and will wind up with a chance of failure around 95% or higher.The failure doesn't mean their method didn't work, just that it wasn't enough to overcome their circumstances.

One final point relates to how some practitioners have described "Typhonian" magick to me. This is a system that works with Qlippoth and other "dark" entities. I'm being careful and using the quotes here because I have never practiced this system myself and I have no idea how many different approaches to it are out there. However, the one I have heard that is relevant to this article is that these entities represent shadow material that can be integrated through invocation. If we know that shadow material does not exist, how does that affect this practice? I would argue that entities, both dark and light, are all manifestations of independent consciousness because it really is the most parsimonious explanation for magical phenomena. That means that practitioners are not integrating their own shadow material, they are calling chaotic, destructive, and potentially very harmful entities into their spheres of consciousness. I fail to see how such a practice could possibly produce positive results.

The study of magical psychology needs to move beyond the 1920's. Psychology and especially neuroscience is a hard science just like biology, and that means the brain and central nervous system just work the way they do and can be investigated empirically. While I am firmly of the opinion that consciousness is not some epiphenomenon of brain function, research has shown that the state of the nervous system and the subjective experience of self-aware cognition are closely linked. Measuring consciousness itself in objective terms remains elusive, but we are becoming more adept all the time at studying the next best thing. In the last twenty years we have made enormous discoveries in that area, let alone the last hundred. As Scientific Illuminists we should work to build our techniques on the best and latest research, not psychoanalytic speculation from a century ago.