16 January 2009
"Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected." — Carl Jung
2 comments:
Do you connect the barbed wire to a shadow in your own self or is your placement of the quote with these pictures more general metaphorical?
I think about the idea in this quote in at least two levels. One is personal. I found the barbed wire in San José extremely distasteful. When something is personally severely disagreeable, moreso than experienced by most people, Jung suggests that there is a clue to our own personality. Second, I think Jung's comments have something to say about our society in which we must separate ourselves so much from the world around us to protect our things. In San José, this separation was strongly visible. But it occurs in many other places, too.
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