I was looking up an old Robert A. Johnson interview I had seen a while ago on youtube, and I was looking for the comment I had made under the video. With my 3rd house lord, Saturn, conjunct the north node, I can find something to complain about with the most brilliant of thinkers (Saturn = complaint; north node = never satisfied), so I knew that despite every single comment raving about the interview, mine would be the only complainy one. Sure enough, I found it!
I do have a tremendous amount of respect and love for Johnson’s words, but I do not like how he acts like Christianity is the best, highest, and only way to fully hold our shadow. I might have fallen for his “resignation to Christianity disguised as wisdom” when I discovered him if I hadn’t already found the Enneagram where you are literally told precisely what your shadows are, are given a much more granular view of your shadow than you will find anywhere else, and then are told how you can integrate it. Hint: it’s self-observation / mindfulness.
When I was a Christian, I too believed “this is as good as it can possibly get, even though some things don’t sit right with me.” As Jesus’ disciples said, “Lord, to whom else can we go?” They just didn’t know where they could find anything better, and Johnson’s book Owning your Own Shadow, published in 1993, seems to come to the same conclusion: there is nowhere else to go. The Enneagram was still pretty cache in 1993, so Johnson didn’t know it existed. It just bothers me that his conclusion is “My teacher was all about integrating your shadow, but in case you need an institution to do a brilliant job of holding the shadow that you can’t integrate [or won’t!], put it in the Church!”
I just don’t understand what he’s thinking- he’s essentially saying “this is as far as shadow work will take you- just drop your baggage off here in the Church because there’s nowhere better out there, no other tools, we’ve reached the end of our knowledge about the shadow at this point.” I mean, is he saying shadow integration doesn’t work without the Church? By the end of Owning Your Shadow, it’s clear that’s what he believes.
The book starts off on an absolutely brilliant note, you can tell he’s distilled the work of Jung into very simple language after doing a lot of wrestling with its meaning. He has lived this work and is writing from within it. He starts off describing the power of the shadow, the control it exercises over us from the unconscious, how we cast our shadow on romantic lovers, heroes and crushes, which makes sense, then the second half of the book starts going off the rails. Little by little, he ramps up the implication that it would be CRAZY to put our shadow in anything but the Christian Church, and how all seekers are going to end up there inevitably. For example:
“Owning the power that lies in our shadow is a particularly challenging task. We can’t own it in the sense of possessing it, for the ego is far too small a container and will inflate out of hand. If one were to possess it, one would likely announce that he was God or, equally outlandish, that God was dead. Nietsche came perilously close to this and paid for it with his sanity. …. It remains for our religious life to find a way to come to terms with this great superpersonal power.”
Johnson, Owning Your Shadow, pg. 70.
Later on he says religion is the only reconciler of opposites, the only unifier of paradoxes (he must know that Jung disagreed?).
“To stay loyal to paradox is to earn the right to unity. Indeed, the most valuable experience of the Christian life is the unitive vision, that most treasured experience of mystical theology, which is won by surrendering to paradox. The medieval world understood this experience, which took one beyond the collision of opposites and brought one into harmony with God.
pg. 88
In the Enneagram, each personality type has its own set of paradoxes unique to it, and the solution for each of the nine types certainly isn’t “Just go to church”. I know Johnson didn’t know the Enneagram, so I can’t get too mad, but honestly. The Enneagram is just a study of each of the nine types’ paradoxes– in fact their paradoxes inside of a larger paradox — and the traps their ego blindly leads them into. Self-awareness is all that is needed to reconcile two opposites; I mean, all you need to do is be aware that you fall for a certain trap and why, and eventually through a self-observation practice (with compassion), you unwind from the paradox. It takes many years of practice, but I have experienced some “unwinding” from a few of my paradoxes, and the little I’ve done, I’ve done without religion (and I’ve gotten WAY farther in my personal development than I did with 30-some years as a Christian, like they aren’t even on the same scale). Why does religion need to get involved? Think about it: you realize that you do something that works against your aims, you understand the internal logic of what is leading you there, you get a lightbulb moment, and you eventually stop doing the thing. For example, one of the paradoxes for the Type Four is that we see ourselves [mistakenly] as both superior and inferior to others because we are so terrified of blending in with the group for fear of losing our unique ego identity that we never develop a skill that would give us an identity that would actually allow us to stand out from the group in any superior sense because developing a skill means letting go of the notion of our inferiority. Which we need, by the way, in order to feel authentic because suffering is more authentic than winning at something. If that isn’t paradoxy enough, I don’t know what is.
Sigh. The guy sadly passed away in 2018 so I’ll content myself to wonder in the riches of his other wisdom. I just don’t understand why no one held his feet to the fire for this intellectual laziness. Psychology has come a loooong way since the Apostle Paul outlined the human paradox as: “I do the things I do not want to do, but I don’t do the things I want to do.”
For the record, this was my disappointed comment under his interview video.
9:15– I’m prepared to like this guy, but I don’t like his sneaky resignation disguised a wisdom that everything has a Christian centre, and we’re just efforting not to fall into it. Hopefully the next generation of Jungians can acknowledge the veracity, dignity, and meaning in an agnostic life. Christianity is colonialism no matter how you slice it. It’s saying “I’ve projected my unconscious onto the Christian god, and you can too. Why take responsibility for the contents of your psyche when you can just place your un-owned gold with a made-up perfect father?”