Shadow Work 4: Why Do We Need the Devil?

Previous blogs about shadow work:

1.      Part I - What is Shadow Work?

2.      Part II - Your Shadow at Work

3.      Part III - Using Images to Explore Your Shadow

In this entry in the series about shadow work, we are going to explore a part of the collective shadow, the problem of evil and how we disown it through the figure of the devil. In this blog, I will mention and describe the actions of some people that may be known and dear to some of my readers. This is not an accident. I don’t believe in long-distance psychoanalyzing so I can’t even pretend to know what went on in their heads. What I’m pointing to is their actions and publicly available information that I use to illustrate a point, rather than to discuss their psyche in particular. I’ve chosen these people, because I don’t want this blog to be just something you read, nod your head and move on. I want you to feel it. So if you find yourself protesting my words, here’s a topic for reflection. If you find yourself approving my words with joy – here’s a topic for reflection.

Read it mindfully. See what you react to. That’s probably a good starting point to do your own shadow work.

Please allow me to introduce myself…

The Prince of Darkness isn’t a good guy, even if he is a man of wealth and taste, as the great British philosopher once said. God is the good guy; the Devil is the bad guy. Because of his arrogance and envy, after an unsuccessful coup d'etat up there in Heaven, Lucifer found himself exiled to Hell, declaring – as Milton famously put it, “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There’s nothing that he enjoys more than to tempt and torture humans, commanding his infernal legions to make our lives a living embodiment of where he now dwells permanently.

Visually, he can appear in many forms, in the first thousand years of Christianity often conveniently bearing visual resemblance to the Gods and Goddesses of pre-Christian Roman and Greek religions. Let’s not get into the political games that certainly must have been at play- religious imagery can be propaganda just as anything else - and take a look at a slightly broader picture: why is it that Christianity has the devil but pagans don’t?

I hear you say: well, there’s the Seth of the Egyptians and Hades of the Greeks, the Roman and Etruscan Orcus and the probably older Tiamat or the famous Mesopotamian Pazuzu that made his way from causing malaria in the Middle East to causing Oscar nominations in Hollywood. Indeed, many cultures before Christianity have had their wrathful deities but they were imagined in a more subtle way. Nothing was so black and white. There were no deities that were only good and those that were only bad. All of them could be both. Or better yet: they were neither. Hecate, the dark goddess of the Greeks, helped save Persephone from Hades, but make her angry and you’re royally screwed.

Monotheistic religions – and Christianity in particular - simplify things: God is all good and the Devil is all bad. God is light and Devil is darkness, even though Lucifer, funny enough, means the Lightbearer. As a constructivist and a psychotherapist, I am not interested in theological questions, but in how these shared, public constructs come about and how we use them in our everyday lives. How we use them and how we abuse them. In other words: why do we need the devil and what purpose does he serve?

Why we must be evil too?

When we give meaning to our own actions and to actions of other people, we always think in binaries. We establish a binary spectrum and then either sort things in an all-or-nothing manner or we arrange them on the spectrum that we’ve established. But either way, our psyche loves binaries! My clinical work and every bit of George Kelly’s theory tell me as much.

Meaning, however, resides in us, not in nature. Nature in itself is neither good nor evil, the very concept is our human invention. Therefore, both reside within – they are ingrained aspects of our psyche. Our great capacity for compassion only exists because we also have the capacity to hate and envy. We can be gentle, only because we can also hurt. We invented both and we are capable of both. The trouble comes when we can’t quite deal with this fact and we only choose to identify with one part of the binary.  

When we think about the ancients, we like to think that they were violent, brutish, primitive. After all, it was before they had “our” (and by our, I mean whatever you think is true) set of beliefs to tell them what’s good and what’s bad. On the other hand, we are quite civilized or, at least, more civilized. The only difference, in fact, is that Romans and Greeks and other ancients were more willing to embrace their own dark side than we are and I argue that this makes them psychologically more mature than most of us living in 2022. They didn’t have Devil’s temptations to blame their own misdeeds on. They couldn’t so easily disown their own capacity to hate, harm, envy…  As C. G. Jun aptly points out:

The dammed-up instinct-forces in civilized man are immensely more destructive, and hence more dangerous, than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living negative instincts. Consequently no war of the historical past can rival a war between civilized nations in its colossal scale of horror.

Jung describes the Devil as a half man and half animal – equating him to the grotesque aspects of our own unconscious minds. What we put into the shadow is what we perceive as such and, disgusted that this is a part of us, we hide it away. We feel horrible looking at it.

Why do we need the Devil?

Think about it. Without the Devil, we might ask what kind of a God tortures Job? Without the concept of evil, how would we explain all the bad things that happen to us or our loved ones? Would we ascribe poverty and sickness and natural catastrophes to a benevolent God? How would we justify our own addictions? The Devil allows us to disown our own evil and the evil of our loved ones, to externalize it and see it as someone else’s. Therefore, we can continue to think of ourselves and “our people” as good.

The way around this is to embrace our shadow and approach it with curiosity. To tame our destructive potential, we need to be aware of it. Perhaps we need to take it a step further: to tame our destructive potential, we need to respect it and even love it. Because it is a part of us, inevitably.

When shadow remains invisible

For a while, I lived in Mississippi. It was a very interesting period in my life, including finally grasping the full semantic complexity of “bless your heart”. It also gave me the opportunity to talk to many people who identify as Christians and whose lives revolve around their religion in a way that I couldn’t see in Miami or New York or, indeed, almost anywhere in Europe. Because I never liked to identify as anything in public (I think we’d all be happier if we identified less), I was presumed to be an atheist, which led me to receive dozens of invitations for church events weekly, all in the attempt to “save” me.

Whereas I was often intrigued by how meaningful Christianity was to its Southern practitioners, how psychologically and spiritually important it was, I was also in complete dismay over the cruelty that would spontaneously and effortlessly emerge when topics would veer into certain directions. It is with love and Christian compassion that they would condemn a rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term, leaving psychological scars for both the baby and the mother. (Something that we have solid scientific evidence for.) It is with love and compassion that they would encourage people to go through incredibly toxic conversion therapy, to “ungay” them. Once more, something that has been scientifically shown to do more harm than good. It was almost as if the suffering endured by people subjected to these cruelties was unnoticed or seen as a symptom of their “problem”, something that’s supposed to bring them closer to God and, therefore, good and not bad.

What was love and compassion in their minds, caused suffering to others. And because they necessarily saw themselves as good, they were able to write off the suffering as coming from the sin, from the devil, not from their barbaric and ineffective methods.  

Those were the Bush years (W, not his daddy, I’m not that old) and I remember how much love they had for him. W. himself probably sleeps peacefully, because he is a God-fearing Christian who loves his neighbor and believes in family values. He is also responsible for millions of innocent civilian deaths and the displacement of tens of millions of people in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I am certain that his fellow Christians don’t see him as a potential war criminal, and I am even more certain that this is not how he sees himself. Unlike the great Roman conquerors like Trajan and Caesar, W. could afford to think of himself as a good man and of his enemies as bad. Because, unlike Roman emperors, he didn’t have to go to the front lines and kill people with a sword, he could pick up the phone and order their deaths in an impersonal, clinical way. He had the luxury of easily disowning his own cruelty. Because technology allows us to be cruel in a sanitized way, it makes it easier to not see our own shadow.

Mother Teresa, just recently declared a saint by Pope Francis, was known as a pious Christian, but also a cruel woman to many of those on the receiving end of her mercy – all in the name of God. She believed that the sick must suffer like Christ did, so if you wanted an antibiotic or some pain medicine, her clinics were the wrong place for you to go. If you wanted the spiritual pleasure of suffering excruciating pain inflicted on you by an aspiring saint – go right ahead!

She too was able to oversee her own cruelty and think of herself as a compassionate Christian precisely because she could preempt herself as good, as opposed to all the evil in the world. She was able to split off a part of her own psyche and delegate it to an external, evil force. She wasn’t able to claim her shadow. When you see yourself as good and nothing but, it’s very easy to explain away all the cruelty you do.

I wonder, if the results of good and evil are the same – pain and suffering – why is this distinction at all relevant? Many good people never ask themselves that question.

In both cases, Bush Junior and Mother Teresa committed some pretty reprehensible acts in the name of good and because they were convinced that they were acting on God’s behalf, they were able to conveniently oversee the unpleasant side-effects of their actions.

If you’re reading this and wondering if I’m trying to say that I think these two individuals were, in fact, bad people, then you’re missing my point. I don’t doubt their intentions for a second, but I question what they chose to overlook. Because they chose to see some things as coming from an evil outside – be it the devil or terrorists – they were blinded to the evil they were doing. Rest assured, the more you were irked by the lines above, the more shadow work you have left to do.

Beyond good and evil

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that from a constructivist point of view, both good and evil are ways in which classify events in the world. Some things or people we deem to be good, others evil. It’s how we see things, it’s the meaning we attribute to them. Because God is good, then his enemy, the Devil, must be evil. Right?

Well, no. From a constructivist point of view, they are not properties of the world itself. Good and evil live inside of us and not somewhere out there. If we divided the world into good and evil, we can also divide it in other ways. For example, we can think of our actions as those that cause suffering and those that don’t. Words that hurt and words that don’t. We can think about being ready to defend ourselves without thinking about attacking, etc. That’s not to say that we have to lose sight of this particular category embodied in the longs standing rivalry between God and the Devil, just that we don’t have to be owned by that one particular category.

In order to reconstruct this dimension and give ourselves the freedom to see things through different lenses, we have to get to know both sides of the coin. The good is easy to talk about, so we must jump into the evil – our own evil – and make it clear to us.

The title of this section is Beyond Good and Evil, intentionally taken from the title of a book that Nietzsche wrote, challenging Western notions of good and evil in a brilliant way. If you are religious and you reacted to something from this text, I urge you even more than others to read Nietzsche and write down any instance of anger, frustration, hatred – anything that comes out and so many things will. Nietzsche is nothing if he’s not triggering. Always remember: the darker the feeling, the nearer you are to your shadow. The more you want to throw the book away, the more you should read it repeatedly. Because that’s how we recognize parts of our shadow that are more easily accessible. Negative emotions are our best teachers. Joy will never lead to as much growth as envy will, if you use it constructively and refrain from judging yourself as this or that.

Getting to know our own evil impulses is hard, gut wrenching and slow, but necessary. This text could be a place to start too. Was there anything that irked you the wrong way? Did you vehemently disagree with something? I can’t say that I didn’t plant some seeds there intentionally. But use them as starting points to reflect on yourself, and not me being right or wrong.

Beginning the journey

·        Think about the devil and what (s)he is to you. Visualize the devil. Talk to the devil. What’s the devil’s story?

·        Think about the world around you, your friends, family, lovers, politicians, musicians, and see who might be like the devil you imagine? Who would you call evil? What’s the agenda of evil?

·        What kind of evil particularly triggers you? What makes you feel angry, outraged, sad, scared, etc.?

Each of these could be a journaling prompt. Or several. But that’s just the beginning. Now comes the hard part:

·        How are you like what you describe as the devil?

·        Wherever you see evil/devil influencing your life, ask yourself: how am I refusing to take responsibility for this situation?

·        When you feel you’re being tempted, ask yourself: why do I actually want this?

I must end this by saying that these questions here are just the beginning. Shadow work is tough, grueling and time consuming. What I’ve suggested here is a way to introduce yourself to some broad aspects of how you disown your own destructive potential. There are other places to start:

·        When someone upsets you, what’s the most violent thing you’ve imagined doing to them?

·        Think of the times when you’ve enjoyed causing harm to someone, even if it’s an animal?

…. But I don’t need to mention that this direct line is painful and may cause you to resist it even more. Because shadow work entails going to those places that scare us, we have to approach them gently. This is why devil as a metaphor works great. You can observe, gather information but talk about an outside agent. Then, once you’re ready, you can start thinking about that agent as a part of you that you disown. Then you can start talking to him. Step by step.

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In the next installment, we’ll explore this topic but from a more practical standpoint. I will share a technique with you that may guide you in this direction, albeit in a gentler, more roundabout way.