Facing Humanity’s Darkness: Struggles With My Personal Demons and The Jungian Shadow Self

I no longer think humans are innately good. This is a new belief, developed over the last 10 years. For the longest time, I believed in our goodness. I believed, if given the right opportunity, education and socialization, we could be a kind, compassionate and thoughtful species.

But this was naive. I overlooked our worst atrocities. I had read plenty about 20th-century horrors like Nazism, American slavery, The Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s regime, or Stalin’s purges, but I ignored its implications. I could not believe the obvious truth in front of me.

But something began to change in the last 10 years. Perhaps it was the rise of Trumpism. Perhaps it was my career in psychotherapy where I began to study individual psychologies more closely. Or perhaps it was reading more pessimistic but realistic views of human nature. Take Freud, the father of my field. It strikes me as odd that my field is filled with superficial and positive psychology when the father of the field was such a pessimist. Look at this passage from his masterpiece, Civilization And Its Discontents,

. . men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual…