The Locked Room
If Barthes showed us that we don't just speak language but are spoken by it, and Deleuze and Guattari turned the self into a bundle of flows and networks, and Latour insisted that the neat border between "modern" and "premodern" was largely PR, Freud and Jung take that whole mess and drag it inside our heads. What if the confusion we feel in society is not only out in the big bad world, but also in a self continuing cold-war espionage with itself?
Freud's classic mic-drop was that you are not the master of your own house. There is no point where consciousness finally catches up with itself and becomes transparent. Think about all the times you’ve said "I don't know why I did that" or "I wasn’t acting like myself" or "I don’t know why I can’t stop eating peanut-butter". Freud's wager was to take those slips, dreams and compulsions seriously, not as random noise but as messages from a part of the mind that doesn't care about your official self‑image.
On the surface you have the ego, the "I" telling a tidy story about who you are and what you want. Underneath you get this pressure cooker of impulses, memories and wishes that have been told "no" often enough that they find other ways back in. Which is repression, not a one‑time delete button, but an unconscious process that keeps certain things from ever fully reaching awareness. The "return of the repressed" is when those things squeeze back in at the edges anyway, surfacing as symptoms, jokes, dreams, inexplicable attraction or disgust. Freud's point is not that everything is secretly about sex and death; it is that we are built around a gap between what we can admit to ourselves and what is actually shaping us. To run it one more time for those in the back, you are not the master of your own house.
If we accept that modernity looks modern because it hides its hybrids and pretends they don't exist, Freud is saying the ego works the same way. It performs a clean, rational, adult self on the surface while all this disavowed material rattles along behind it in the dark. Both projects are haunted by what they exclude. The more you insist you are "over" something, the more likely it is to show up sideways.
Jung came out of that Freudian world and then went solo, kind of like Simon and Garfunkel and then Art Garfunkel solo. The difference being that Jung's solo work had a genuinely interesting idea in it, which he called the "shadow".
The shadow is everything about yourself that you cannot or will not see. Not just embarrassing desires but also capacities you have never owned. You build a persona to move through the world: the hard worker, the nice person, a victim or a chill hang. The shadow is made of whatever doesn't fit that persona. Maybe you see yourself as endlessly reasonable, so your rage goes into the shadow. Maybe you see yourself as a tough realist, so your neediness and tenderness get sent on a sabbatical. You don't lose them; you just exile them.
We can see this outside an individual problem. Groups, classes and nations all have shadows. A culture that worships productivity throws idleness and vulnerability into the dark. A culture that prides itself on tolerance shoves its own aggression and domination somewhere it does not have to look at it. Often the more spotless a self‑image has to be, the more swollen the shadow.
The shadow, is not simply "the bad stuff". It is more like a locked room where we put anything that would complicate the story we like to tell about ourselves. That can include cruelty, sure, but it also often includes creativity, sexuality, political anger, the capacity to say no. His worry is that whatever we refuse to acknowledge, we will end up acting out. Individuals who cannot admit their own aggression become passive‑aggressive. Nations that cannot face their history of violence externalise it in endless moral crusades.
But here is where it gets more uncomfortable for our specific moment. "Freud and Jung were largely mapping a psyche built around 'No': prohibitions, taboos, things you genuinely cannot let yourself know.” But the philosopher Alenka Zupančič identifies a subtler and arguably more contemporary mechanism: disavowal.
Not "I don't know" but "I know perfectly well, and". I know perfectly well that the fast fashion I buy is produced under terrible conditions, that the content I consume is making me more anxious, that the thing I am about to say in the argument is unfair. The knowing itself becomes the alibi for continuing. Confession becomes a kind of indulgence. The shadow doesn't just skulk in the dark; it sits under a spotlight and says "yes I know, isn't that interesting" and carries on exactly as before.
Our current psychic landscape is organised around a relentless, internalised "Yes you can". The disciplinary society told you "No" and made neurotics. The achievement society tells you "Yes, optimise yourself, perform yourself, express yourself" and makes depressives and burnout cases. As with the shadow, it doesn't disappear, it comes back as exhaustion, as numbness, as the inability to encounter genuine connection. The sense of being sealed inside your own reflection with nowhere left to push against.
Freud and Jung are not offering a self‑help fix where you "integrate your shadow" in three easy steps and become a perfectly balanced person. What they add is a structural discomfort. There is no point, personally or collectively, where we become fully transparent to ourselves. There is always some remainder, some unassimilated bit. The question is not whether it exists but how we live with it, and whether we live with it consciously or let it run us from the back room.
There is no single, unified "society in here" any more than there is out in the world. There are only arrangements and compromises between parts of ourselves that would often rather not be seen together.
Maybe a culture that cannot symbolise its own shadow has to act it out in other ways. And a culture that disavows what it already knows, that uses acknowledgement as a substitute for action, is doing something more slippery still. Maybe our current moment is asking us "what are we refusing to see?" and then, harder still "what are we seeing perfectly clearly, and choosing to carry on regardless?"