In the movie Take This Waltz, a young Canadian woman, Margot, is happily married although not excited about her life. Her work doesn’t fulfill her. She designs brochures but would rather be a “real” writer. She describes herself as afraid of being afraid. In her state of ambivalence, Margot becomes attracted to an artist who lives the creative, uninhibited life she yearns for.
The artist draws an image of Margot as a women cleaved: one half happy and bright, the other dark and mysterious. She is startled, even offended by the image, but also feels seen, her shadow self witnessed. The artist begins to court Margot’s unacknowledged dark side, the part that holds unfilled desires her other half fears. The shadow self begins to struggle for the light. Her marriage and bright self are in jeopardy.
Take This Waltz explores a relatively common threat to committed relationships: the new love interest. Although the theme is an old one, the movie suggests a more personal motivation: rather than a choice between two people, the alternative is fundamentally about who one might become.
Today, at least in the West, it’s easy to change partners without shame or judgment for “failed” relationships. Yet the ease and frequency at which some people de-couple may obscure an internal split self, which is avoided, if not denied, by the quest to find a partner who might replace the hard work of individuation.
Early life trauma has a way of cleaving the psyche as the child tries to mature despite adversity. Typically, this involves avoiding or dissociating painful emotions and memories that interfere with the natural impulse to grow. However, this is a shameful way of living that inhibits confidence and authentic self-expression. Along with avoiding memories and emotions, parts of the self are also sacrificed.
The imagination is also a reliable way to “flee” abusive or emotionally invalidating environments, particularly if there are no safe people or places to turn to when distressed. Unfortunately, there are long-term consequences when the imagination becomes primarily a method for escape. According to Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched:
Fantasyzing is a dissociated state, which is neither imagination nor living in external reality, but a kind of melancholic self-soothing compromise which goes on forever — a defensive use of the imagination in the service of anxiety and avoidance.
Any trauma that engenders shame can foster a split between the self shown to the world and the self hidden in fantasy. This is not a pathological reaction, but rather a normal response to traumatic or emotionally invalidating relationships, if not also some societal norms. Indeed, the dilemma is not that there are hidden or unacknowledged parts of the self. Rather, difficulties emerge because most of us never learn how to foster psychological integration, for which both imagination and cognition play central roles.
The West is odd in its pursuit of a unitary self and its sense of adulthood as a time when the imagination is no longer essential to maturation and growth. In contrast, many nonwestern cultures acknowledge the multiplicity of selves inhabiting each person, along with the importance of the mythical imagination for guiding choices made in the “real” world. Even early Greeks — for centuries the model for Western psyche — used their pantheon of gods and goddesses to provide insight into the often-contradictory aspects of human nature that cause us at times to act like multiple people.
The modern world seems to need that we split. The expansion of civilizations and world religions such as Christianity engendered perceptions of humanity as divisible into good and evil, in effect splitting the experience of personhood (and preferably, inspiring us to inhabit only the good part). This may seem a very natural way of being, perhaps even necessary for creating safe societies in which we regularly interact with strangers in the commerce of life and must trust they will not try to harm us.
According to poet and anthropologist Stanley Diamond, prior to civilization an amoral (versus immoral) understanding of the world guided human belief systems. This amoral understanding of human nature is perhaps easier to maintain when you spend your entire life with a relatively limited number of people, all of whom know you intimately, including both your “good” and “evil” ways, just as you know theirs. However, according to Diamond, with the expansion of civilizations and Judeo-Christian beliefs:
The concrete ambivalence of the human condition is denied, good and evil have a dual rather than a single source as in the complex unity of the primitive consciousness.
More than the creation of a world of “good” people, distinctions between good and evil foster a psychological split since few of us are ever purely good or purely evil:
Actual behavior is never wholly good nor wholly evil: such pristine purity is never encountered. …the abstraction becomes a weapon against the person.
For psychiatrist Carl Jung transcending inner splits and becoming an integrated person required acknowledging shadow parts of the self and accepting the inevitability of both good and evil, which reside in all of us. He wrote in The Red Book:
If the power of growth begins to cease, then the united falls into its opposites. We suspect and understand that growth needs both, and hence we keep good and evil close together. Because we know that too far into the good means the same as too far into the evil, we keep them both together.
Perhaps some degree of splitting is a price paid for living in civilizations, which is further exacerbated by trauma and adversity. Most of us habitually avoid, deny, or dissociate aspects of ourselves to feel good about who we are, if not also believe we are lovable. We also generally lack myths and rituals or other collective experiences that in some cultures teach how to use the imagination as a tool for acknowledging and transforming aspects of personhood.
As we mature, we are expected to partition inner worlds of fantasy and replace imaginal preoccupations with what society counts as real. However, without the wisdom and methods needed to support integration and individuation, it’s no surprise many of us are compelled to seek a romantic partner who witnesses in ourselves what we keep hidden in fantasy. Consequently, conditions are ripe for acting from our shadow selves in ways we later regret, even if our actions begin as the simple wish for unconditional love of all that we are.
References
Diamond, Stanley. 1972. “Introductory Essay: Job and the Trickster.” In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, edited by Paul Radin, xi-xxii. New York: Schocken Books.
Hart, Onno van der, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis, and Kathy Steele. 2006. The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. New York: WW Norton & Co.
Jung, Carl G. 2009. The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Kalsched, Donald. 1996. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. New York: Routledge.
Photo of “Sin with Olives,” By Ed Ruscha (1969)
Originally published 2013/01/18
Revised 2022/03/13
© Laura K Kerr, PhD. All rights reserved (applies to writing and photography).
