Dissolve and Integrate: On the Shadow, Sexuality, & Aggression
The following text is a transcript I created from a Q&A session following a lecture on archetypal psychology. Dr. Jordan Peterson answers a question, posed by a student, regarding the psychological shadow concept. I wanted this transcript for myself (I've listened to this section at least fifty times), but also to share it, as it touches on some of the core issues psychotherapy tackles. A 10-minute video excerpt can be found here, the full lecture here, and the original podcast here, with this question beginning at 2:27:45. Dr. Jordan Peterson's work can be found here. Enjoy.
~ Dave S Wallace, MS, MA
Peter Paul Rubens' "The Death of Adonis," depicts the story of Venus and her lover Adonis, whose failure to listen to her premonitions resulted in his death by beasts. A classic by Ovid, rewritten by many including Shakespeare.
Student: I've been struggling with an idea, but I was thinking you might be able to help me out with it. In a recent interview, you talked about how myth is meant to reconcile inherent contradictions in reality, but I'm stuck between two mythological, or psychoanalytic, ideas which are both really important but seem to have an inherent contradiction between them. On one hand, there is this idea that there are times in your life when you have to identify things that are insufficient; there's a problem that requires a controlled burn or phoenix-like transformation where you discard part of yourself that doesn't fit or is not working. On the other hand, there's this Jungian idea that as your get older, you mature by re-incorporating things about yourself that you lost when you were younger – you're trying to integrate your shadow or trying to find parts of your personality that maybe you've been rejecting. You're trying to bring them into the fold. Jung has this quote that I like which is, "I'd rather be whole than good.” So on one hand, we may identify something as a problem that we want to get rid of or "burn off," but on the other hand, it seems like the path to being stronger is to figure out how to put everything together.
Professor: So one of the things Jung wrote about in his works on alchemy was an explanation of the prime alchemical dictum Solve et Coagula which means "dissolve and integrate.” So imagine this: imagine you had a fairly hostile father who was not very well controlled in his aggression (decent person other than that but let's say that) and your reaction is "I'm never going to be aggressive!" You've built a moral structure – it's part of your personality, and there's possibility floating around outside that, but you've stripped the idea of aggression of any ethical utility whatsoever. So what happens? This moral structure burns off, now that aggression comes back up, and you still have to integrate it.
It's associated in some sense Nietzsche's idea of morality as cowardice. One of Nietzsche's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality is that most of what passes for morality isn't morality, it's just cowardice. It's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you, it's that I'm afraid to hurt you, and because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you, I say I'm moral. I can mask my essential fear and cowardice in this guise of morality.
It's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you; it's that I'm afraid to hurt you, and because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you, I say I'm moral.
That happens far more often than you would think because harmless and moral are by no means the same thing. This is where Freud is such a genius because he concentrated on aggression and sexuality, perhaps the two most difficult parts of a personality to integrate. So some of what you're burning off is hyper-simplified morality that stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche.
This is partly because aggression and sexuality are primal forces. It's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with them, that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest. The problem is that by denying the worst in yourself and suppressing it you preclude the possibility of the best, because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression. Without that capacity for aggression, you cannot say “No" because “no" means, if you really say it, “no” means, “There isn't anything you can do to me that will make me change my mind," or conversely it means, "I will play for higher stakes than you will." Unless you've got your aggression integrated, there isn't a chance you can say that and if you did no one would take you seriously because they would know it was just a show.
One of the most useful things Jung did was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow because he was interested in the idea of evil (especially in trying to parcel out what happened in Nazi Germany during the second world war). What do you do with the part of yourself that's aggressive and potentially malevolent? Do you just crush it? That's the superego response in some sense. Do you just put it behind you, so to speak? Is that a possibility, or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game? For Freud in some sense, morality was superego clamping down on the id. They were fundamentally opposed. Both Jung and Piaget had a different idea, and I think they were right. It’s like “No no, you invite the bad guys out to play." So you're an aggressive hockey player, but it's disciplined aggression. That makes you and gives you access to all sorts of energy you wouldn't otherwise have. And in regards to sexuality, well, untrammeled promiscuity doesn't constitute a virtue, but neither does unavoidable virginity. In fact, I think that's worse because it also masks itself with “virtue.”
Do you just crush it? No, no, you invite the bad guys out to play.
It’s like this. You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do. That's the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don’t, and that's not cowardice. So the goal is to burn off the things that get in the way of that integration.
Student: When you say "dissolve and integrate," would a good way to bring these two ideas together be to say that the "burning off" and the "difficult processes" are necessary because the elements of yourself are structured together in a rigid way that's not working properly?
Professor: Yes. That's what happens to Geppetto in the belly of the whale. He's so caught in his presuppositions that he can't escape. Pinocchio represents the new force. It's very interesting – when you watch Pinocchio try to rescue him the first thing that Geppetto does is confuse Pinocchio with a fish because he wants something to eat, but Pinocchio is better than something to eat because he can rescue him so that he doesn't need to eat. Then Pinocchio wants to make a fire and Geppetto objects because he's going to burn up all the furniture, but it's like “We don't need the damn furniture if we're getting out of the whale." Geppetto – he's older. That's the rigid structure; that’s the old year that has to die off before the new year can be born; it's a forest fire that allows for new growth. That's how those things are put together.
It's useful to know too because you might think, "If you burn something off, there's nothing left," but that's not true. If it's deadwood, then you have room for new growth. You want to be doing that on a fairly regular basis. That's the snake that sheds its skin and transforms itself; that's the death and resurrection, from a psychological perspective; it's exactly the same idea.
You might think that if you burn something off there's nothing left," but that's not true. If it's deadwood, then you have room for new growth.
Now we don't know the upper limit to that because we don't know what a person would be like if they let everything go that they could let go, let go, and only let in what was seemly. It's funny, we don't know that to some degree but you can see that; you can see people start to do that. That's not a rare experience. People improve very rapidly. They can improve their lives very rapidly. A lot of it is low-hanging fruit; if you just stop doing very stupid things that you know are stupid, your life improves a lot. It frees you up.
There's an element there that's also associated with pride. People tend to take pride in who they are and that's a bad idea because that stops you from becoming who you could be – if you're proud of who you are, you won't let that go when it's necessary, you won't step away from it when it’s necessary. You end up being your own parity, something like that. That's also a very bad idea. You want to be continually stepping away from your previous self.
People tend to take pride in who they are, and that's a bad idea because that stops you from becoming who you could be.
Part of that too is that you have to decide: Are you order? Are you chaos? or are you the process that mediates between them?
If you're the process that mediates between them, you are the thing that transforms. That's the right attitude for a human being because that is what we are – we are the thing that voluntarily confronts chaos and transforms. For better or worse, that's our deepest biological essence.
So you can let things go, when you know there's more growth to come.
