'"The shadow," wrote Jung (1963), is "that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious" (cited in Diamond, p. 96). The shadow is a primordial part of our human inheritance, which, try as we might, can never be eluded. The pervasive Freudian defense mechanism known as projection is how most people deny their shadow, unconsciously casting it onto others so as to avoid confronting it in oneself. Such projection of the shadow is engaged in not only by individuals but groups, cults, religions, and entire countries, and commonly occurs during wars and other contentious conflicts in which the outsider, enemy or adversary is made a scapegoat, dehumanized, and demonized. Two World Wars and the current escalation of violence testify to the terrible truth of this collective phenomenon. Since the turn of the twenty-first century we are witnessing a menacing resurgence of epidemic demonization or collective psychosis in the seemingly inevitable violent global collision between radical Islam and Judeo-Christian or secular western culture, each side projecting its collective shadow and perceiving the other as evil incarnate.'

Comment: Guest: 'Absolutely simplistic and typical of people who don't "think" beyond what other people tell them to think. Imagine yourself as the Minotaur. Born as a creature no one wanted, born from the lust of a goddess to a bull, hated from conception to birth. Instead of given pitty or love when born, was imprisoned in a horrible place with no human contact other than the ones he fed on. What choice did he have, eat something that didn't look like him, or starve to death. He was born without education of morals or philosophy. He was treated as a monster, so he behaved like one to the eyes of other humans. To him, he was just trying to live, fearing his whole existence, surviving on, yes, instinct. And one day a "hero" comes to kill him. For the Minotaur, he probably was scared beyond his imagination. Something stronger than him was trying to kill him and he didn't know why. One has to ask, how long was the Minotaur in the maze, why were only children sent down there. Most likely cause the Minotaur was young himself, and probably lame. The only thing I read from this myth was that of a deformed outcast who was lost, weak and fearful, to be only killed by someone who was "normal" and be called a "strong and powerful hero" for it.' -- When you cut the throat of the abyss...

'Exorcism can be said to be the prototype of modern psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, like exorcism, commonly consists of a prolonged, pitched, demanding, soul-wrenching, sometimes tedious bitter battle royale with the patient's diabolically obdurate emotional "demons," at times waged over the course of years or even decades rather than weeks or months, and not necessarily always with consummate success. And there is now growing recognition--not only by psychoanalytic practitioners--of the very real risks and dangers of psychic infection inherent also in the practice of psychotherapy. (This psychic susceptibility is almost universally depicted in these films, starting with The Exorcist and most recently by The Devil Inside.) Counter-transference is what we clinicians technically call this treacherous psychological phenomenon, which can cause the psychotherapist (or exorcist) to suffer disturbing, subjective symptoms during the treatment process – sometimes even as the patient progresses! Hence the ever-present importance for psychotherapists, like exorcists, to perform their sacred work within a formally ritualized structure, making full use of collegial support, cooperation and consultation, and to maintain inviolable personal boundaries. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, no one wrestles with the emotional demons of others all day without themselves being affected. This is an unavoidable occupational hazard of both exorcism and psychotherapy.'

'These self-appointed "leaders" (who do not exist, they say) such as DeGraw and Assange seem to have outsized clout in a movement that is supposed to be grass-roots and consultative. The non-leadership of OWS seems intent on focusing the movement directly on Wall Street and its captains of greed, despite dissenting voices and libertarian involvement. Zero Hedge carried an article yesterday warning about the scapegoating of Wall Street as a "catalyst for class warfare." The article cited a new poll commissioned by The Hill concluding that, "in the minds of likely voters, Washington, not Wall Street, is primarily to blame for the financial crisis and the subsequent recession." This does not seem to bother DeGraw who merrily soldiers forward as the scourge of Wall Street. Talk of guillotines, of the French Revolution and class warfare (that inevitably ends in the bloodshed of the middle class that DeGraw is supposedly avenging) seem not to bother him. Is DeGraw aware of history's lessons? If you don't change the system the problems will reoccur. Sure, punish people if it makes you feel good. Hang 'em high. Behead them. But first do SOMETHING SERIOUS. Confront the real issue, which is money creation and the euphorias it causes.'

'As far as their fans are concerned, celebrities fulfil two emotional functions: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment). The slightest deviation from these prescribed roles provokes enormous rage and makes us want to punish (humiliate) the "deviant" celebrities. But why? When the human foibles, vulnerabilities, and frailties of a celebrity are revealed, the fan feels humiliated, "cheated", hopeless, and "empty". To reassert his self-worth, the fan must establish his or her moral superiority over the erring and "sinful" celebrity. The fan must "teach the celebrity a lesson" and show the celebrity "who's boss". It is a primitive defense mechanism – narcissistic grandiosity. It puts the fan on equal footing with the exposed and "naked" celebrity.'

'WASHINGTON—In a hastily called press conference broadcast live on all major television networks this morning, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg implored every citizen of the United States to induce vomiting immediately. "Please, everybody, there's no time to explain. Just gag yourselves, drink ipecac, do whatever is necessary to puke everything out right now—all of it," Hamburg said moments before jamming her index and middle fingers deep into her throat and violently disgorging the contents of her stomach all over the lectern. "Do it now! Now, now, now!" As of press time, the FDA released a statement saying that everyone should have vomited by now and informing those who hadn't that it was "too late."'

'...the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and economic activities. I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important social task we face today. -- The main psychological mechanism that operates in all child abuse involves using children as what I have termed poison containers – receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves.'

"I'm feeling pretty inspired. I'm feeling pretty rejuvenated. I feel like maybe Osama Bin Laden had a deeper psychological impact on me over the past ten years than I'd like to admit. I know I usually try to run from my problems and hide behind things. I'm just a bro in suburbia making consumer decisions. You see, Osama Bin Laden, you want the same things I want. I want to be famous. I want to be rich. I want to be controversial. I want to live in some sort of multimillion dollar compound. I want to be so buzzworthy that I have to go underground to preserve my authenticity and to preserve my life. I want to be remembered forever. I want people to remember that I believed in something even if what I believed in was totally wrong and I totally messed up. I just wanted people to know that there was a moment in time that I believed that I can make the world a better place, that my vision of the world was worth imposing on everyone else. I'm just trying to be an all-American Chill Bro."

'"For more than two years, we combed the Middle East looking for bin Laden," Rumsfeld said. "Frankly, it was starting to be an embarrassment. You can imagine our surprise when we finally found him hiding deep inside the darkest recesses of each and every one of our souls." "It just goes to show that sometimes it's easier to look for the man in the FBI dossier than it is to look at the man in the mirror," Rumsfeld added. "He evaded us for so long because he had such an ingenious hideout," Rumsfeld said. "Only someone as evil as bin Laden would think to crawl down into that hole inside every one of us, the one that makes us hate instead of love, forget birthdays, and ignore alternate-side parking rules." "There is only one way to defeat Osama bin Laden," Bush said. "The way to eliminate this evil man is for each American to love just a little bit more, see your brother's problems as your own, always look on the bright side, and leave every place a little better than you found it."'

'The Joker being Batman's Shadow Archetype is explored by Alan Moore in Batman: The Killing Joke, where the Joker tries to turn Commissioner Gordon insane by putting him through "one bad day" (including shooting his daughter Barbara, which had the bonus effect of paralyzing her, and running him through a literal carnival of horrors). In the end, when Batman confronts the Joker, the Joker says, "You had a bad day once, am I right? ... I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed." This is all while we see what could be the Joker's origin, where his "bad day" consisted of his wife and baby dying... maybe. The whole thing ends with Batman and the Joker laughing together at one of his jokes about two guys in a lunatic asylum.'

'Mr Jones, a London taxi driver finds a mysterious bird in the road late one night, and takes him home to his terraced house in North London, to haunt the Jones family at Number 6 Rainwater Crescent in the suburb of Rumbury Town. His small daughter Arabel becomes passionately attached to the bird despite his wild and wrecking ways, and understands his every wish, even though he will only ever say one word - 'Nevermore!' 'His name is Mortimer,' she says, and from that moment onwards he is the other half of her life. -- Joan Aiken described the partnership as like that of the Ego and the Id, but instead of an imaginary friend who gets into trouble, Arabel has a 'giant awful black bird,' as her hysterical mother soon discovers.'

'In Jungian psychology, the shadow or "shadow aspect" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes... "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. ...if these projections are unrecognized "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object – if it has one – or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion... Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity."'

'Projective identification ... designates a psychological process in which a person engages in the ego defense mechanism projection in such a way that their behavior towards the object of projection invokes in that person precisely the thoughts, feelings or behaviors projected. Projective identification differs from simple projection in that projective identification is a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a person, believing something false about another, relates to that other person in such a way that the other person alters their behavior to make the belief true. The second person is influenced by the projection and begins to behave as though he or she is in fact actually characterized by the projected thoughts or beliefs. This is a process that generally happens outside the awareness of both parties involved, though this has been debated.' -- Predations upon those of a guilty conscience. Hence the grifters motto: You can't cheat an honest man.

"The true purpose of power is to have huge vats of the population that you can vomit your own poison into rather than deal with it yourself."

The "Sheeple" as a poison container for parental/sibling trauma: "If you come up with an ideology that is fundamentally impossible for, and opposed to, reality and human nature and the necessities of our biological development... why would you set up something like Anarcho-Communism? which not only is it impossible in the world but you can't even do it in your own life—at least you can do Anarcho-Capitalism/voluntary association and peaceful relations in your own life—but you can't do no property in your own life... So I think that is a way of doing 'I'm too good for this world,' where you set up this ideology of 'virtue' that is more about pomposity and hatred than it is about the desire to motivate others to be good. You set up this standard of 'virtue' which is impossible and distasteful and weird for people—and then what happens is, you get to be angry at them for not [reaching] your lofty 'moral' standards and so you get to vent all your disgust onto the world."

'The notion that leaders really lead, not follow, is as much a group-fantasy as the leader's charismatic power to command the sun's rise and fall. A leader is a single individual sitting at a desk in one corner of one city. The power we conditionally delegate to him resides in the group-fantasy, since the leader's function is to act as a poison container for our group-fantasies. If he should unexpectedly die, the container disappears and our fears return to us in a rush. Even if he has been a totally incompetent leader, we panic. ...the charisma of leaders is purely a defensive grandiosity of our own, compensating for our feelings of childhood helplessness. Thus a leader's strength seems inevitably to decay. ...there are four phases of group-fantasies about leaders, as they become less and less able to provide grandiose manic solutions to the nation's growing growth panic: (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse and (4) upheaval.' ...

'...the leader is less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated social alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are sacrificed when the leader is under attack. This leadership task of being the delegate of irrational desires of the people makes leaders experts in masochism, rather than sadism, as traditional power theory requires. Only by carefully following our unconscious commands are leaders followed. We might follow them into war and lay down our lives to combat an enemy they alone designated, but the moment they try to ignore the group-fantasy and avoid our hidden commands, people simply do not hear them.'

'Societies whose institutions progress beyond their average childrearing mode become the most fearful and most violent, since their growth panic depends upon both the amount of early trauma and the amount of social progress. Thus unaccustomed Weimar freedoms lead directly to Auschwitz in a Germany formed by brutal childrearing. If there ever were a society where parents really helped their children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics, without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are imagined to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire); "pushiness" (our striving) and so on.'

'Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Why didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Shall we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that they allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by traumatic memories... By dissociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with these persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creating a replacement.'

'The [is a] yearning for a phantom placenta a "poison container" for our dangerous emotions... Leaders are poison containers for our feelings. Poison containers are objects into which we can dump our disowned feelings, just as we once pumped our polluted blood into the placenta, hoping for it to be cleansed. We ascribe to poison containers all kinds of magical placental significances, including the power to cleanse our emotions, which are felt to be like polluted blood in accordance with their fetal origin. When the leader appears unable to handle these emotions, when he appears to be weakening and abandoning us, when our progress in life seems to involve too much independence and we re-experience our early abandonment by our placenta and our parents, we begin to look for enemies to inflict our traumas upon. War, then, is a sacrificial ritual designed to defend against fears of individuation and maternal engulfment by restaging our early traumas upon scapegoats.'