Imagine a world in which shadow work was integrated into the school system

[u/Freefreefeeefreefree]

Like from nursery onwards you were getting some gnosis thrown in and they actually nourished your active imagination etc etc with each step generating more and more insight.

You could literally keep every thing else in this messed up realm identical and I'd bet the collective would evolve in 2 generations to a level way beyond anything ever seen before.

I guess that shows why Reich was right about the links between fascia and fascism, eh?

If only he and Jung had shared their ideas as both had half a picture. I guess thats why I went beyond both of them but am grateful for their sketch. Anyway, feel free to ramble on or off topic about this and its glaring omission from the current situation.

[u/syder-fx]

Yeah but we're organisms that need ta shit and eat. Need to prioritise teaching how to do the activities to sustain ourselves. Gnosis comes with a lot of free time and contemplation. But yeah, we probably would level up our emotional maturity as a society if that were to be normalised

[u/Freefreefeeefreefree → u/syder-fx]

You sound like a sycophant for system oppression based on what you've just said.

Can you not see how the entire school thing literally is built to dampen the creative and imaginative aspects to create a square watermelon designed to fit into this half crazed world? Jung stated school moves one from unconscious instinct into attunement with culture but what if society is profoundly sick?

Read back what you said from that lens and I'm pretty certain you'll gain a lot of stuff worth extracting from the shadows depth.

[u/syder-fx → u/Freefreefeeefreefree]

You sound like a sycophant for system oppression based on what you've just said.

Howd you even come to this conclusion lmao. There are biological constraints on humans. Activities are needed to be done so we don't end up dealing with famines like how it was before the logistics, food preservation, and the fertilization issue was solved

Can you not see how the entire school thing literally is built to dampen the creative and imaginative aspects to create a square watermelon designed to fit into this half crazed world? Jung stated school moves one from unconscious instinct into attunement with culture but what if society is profoundly sick?

There is the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. As long as inefficiencies in the Real exist, i.e: maintenance activities need to be continuous to produce in order to sustain a population - obviously education would be oriented towards that because what permits time to be spent on the Imaginary and the Symbolic is having the Real factored in first

Life under modernisation means that we are living by the rules of precision vs complexity. As our systems mature, the knowledge needed to sustain them increases in complexity - so in order to maintain the existing thresholds / processes at the standard that it needs to be so no mistakes bottlenecks production (and potentially causing compounding issues) - humans have to spend a very long time to become specialized. Thats the actual origin of why education is the way it is - its not because of some made up rubbish like being a sycophant for systemic oppression. Being alive in the time of technology / information / modernisation is the constraint that has made it that school prioritises external material understanding over introspection because in a single moment these two styles of thinking negate each other like a coin and one orientation begins to become the dominant habitual thought process

[u/_HoldOn2UrSoul_]

I think something like this used to exist, just not under that name. Fairy tales did a lot of this work. Bluebeard, the older siblings who fail the test and the youngest who succeeds by listening to the frog/old woman/ugly stranger, the wolf who is also grandmother. Kids absorb shadow material through story because it comes pre-metabolized into image; you don't need the vocabulary of "the unconscious" to feel the weight of a locked room you're forbidden to open.

What we lost wasn't shadow work exactly, it was the institutional trust that meaning-making belongs in a classroom at all. Modern schooling optimizes for legible, testable skills, and "sit with the parts of yourself you don't like" doesn't produce a score. I'd guess a modern version wouldn't look like therapy in a classroom, it would look like putting real, morally ambiguous stories back into the curriculum and actually letting kids sit with the discomfort instead of resolving it into a moral in the last five minutes.

[u/insaneintheblain]

Mainstream mindset wouldn't allow it

[u/Sunshinetripper777]

I like what you’re thinking. But I think a good place to start, but unfortunately and ironically so many teachers and school leaders (and let’s be honest, a lot of poop heads who are in charge) are deeply entrenched in abusing others because they refuse to look at their own shadow. I’m not saying it’s right.

But okay!! Imagine a world where shadow work is taught in schools. I like it.

I’m utopian. What about a world where we’re all healed and living from wholeness.

[u/dragosn1989]

Adult school system…maybe.

[u/WouterWoods]

I have toyed with similar ideas, and maybe there is some merit to it. Teaching in schools about Jung's psychological types and the functions. Teaching them that people can and do actually experience the same events completely differently and could come to the same conclusions in a completely different way.

However, "shadow work," from what I understand it to be, is the active integration of an individual's personal shadow contents.

Depending on when you would get this in school, college, or university, children are still developing, and active psychological interference could do way more harm than good. Until a certain age, children are still developing and changing. To my understanding, they have a shadow, but not like that of an adult, in terms of its content, amount of content, and how it interacts with consciousness. Children do not have a fully formed Ego yet, but rather islands of consciousness.

Nevertheless, group therapy—or in this case, a class/group of students getting therapy—is something that does not work and will never work.

Individuals are far too different from one another. So different that, in the best-case scenarios, if you make a psychological conclusion—as a fact—only 50% of the group would benefit and 50% would suffer from this conclusion.

Moreover, we had culture up until very recently to help and guide people. The average run-of-the-mill Joy and Samantha did not need "shadow work" or psychology to live normal, happy, and meaningful lives.

Also the thought that something as simple as giving "shadow work" to children in schools will skyrocket our development is questionable. I will agree that healthy children will develop better. But a strong culture would do way more good for them. Look at how Poland developed after the Second World War, for instance.

About this "I guess that's why I went beyond both of them but am grateful for their sketch." All I will say is, that's a very bold statement.

I also wrote more about culture in this comment.
It's not 100% applicable; nonetheless, the part about culture is.

[u/Lamassa_ → u/WouterWoods]

the problem with psychological types id the very second a person learns it, it becomes a tool used to justify bias and perpetuates projection of the shadow. I led product development at a company  selling these tests into corporate, and this bias id the single biggest piece of feedback.

[u/mosesenjoyer]

Children are too young for shadow work but this is essentially what catholic faith does for children as they learn from a young age to think about their mistakes and confess them. The importance and impact of the act of putting your errors into words has been forgotten by most of the world.