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A Native American elder once described
his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me
there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil.
The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked
which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, the one I feed the most.
George Bernard Shaw
 We claim certain characteristics that define who we are.
Collectively, all other human characteristics are our potential. These traits
are referred to as our shadow
by Carl Jung. If we describe ourselves as friendly, cultured, and generous, our
potential contains our capability for belligerence, barbarism, and selfishness.
Potential can also be described as the characteristics that we have not
developed. Characteristics that we do not like, characteristics that we do not
acknowledge, and are repressed, characteristics that do not fit our image of
ourselves, characteristics that are within the subconscious mind,
characteristics that we hide from other people, characteristics that we would
like to claim but don't dare to claim, and characteristics that are simply
unknown or unexpressed. Each person contains the potential for every conceivable
thought and feeling and action, including the extremes of behavior from the
kindness of Mother Teresa to the savagery of Adolph Hitler.
Potential can be explained in other terms.
Potential is not a
structure of its own. It is the elements within each design that match the
categories given above, These are characteristics that we do not acknowledge or
accept or like. Each characteristic is represented by a thought or image or
energy tone in the design. If we consider ourselves to be a hard working
employee, then the employee design would also contain thoughts and images
regarding laziness, from the various occasions when we have entertained the
option of being lazy but have rejected it.
How our potential is created.
In childhood and throughout our life, we develop an ego that has a collection
of traits and we usually do not think of ourselves as having the opposite trait.
If we view ourselves as a compassionate person rather than as a vicious person,
our capacity for viciousness becomes an element of our potential. Consciously or
unconsciously, we adopt certain characteristics because those are the ones that
are rewarded by our parents, friends, peers, teachers, religious leaders,
employers, ourselves, and other people whose opinion matters to us. Some
characteristics and their opposites include gentle and violent, forgiving and
vengeful, brave and cowardly, rational and irrational, honest and deceitful,
cheerful and gloomy, intelligent and dull, hard working and lazy, and confident
and insecure. The traits that we reject are cast into our potential, where they
remain energized, autonomous, and ready to be expressed. Our potential is
different for each of us. As we develop into unique individuals, our potential
becomes unique. If someone is shy, their potential contains boldness,
contrarily, a bold person has shyness in their potential.
There are various reasons why the contents of our potential can seem to be
harmful:
 | If our ego associates itself with the qualities of decent behavior, our
potential naturally and guiltlessly becomes the repository of our capacity for
greed, jealousy, violence, and all other socially unacceptable traits. The
potential is an innocent storage facility, like a computer that is not to blame
for a hateful document that is on its hard drive. |
| When we rejected particular thoughts, images, and actions from the ego, we
may have rejected them with a negative context. Instead of saying simply,
"I choose not to be a mean person," we said, "I don't want to be
a mean person, because I hate mean people, and I'm afraid of mean people".
In our potential, when we encounter our own capacity for meanness, or as we
encounter what we call the meanness design, we encounter the elements
that we have implanted there, the energy tones such as hatred or fear, the nasty
images that we have created to depict mean people, and the damning thoughts
toward mean people. We blame our potential itself for that negativity, instead
of realizing that we are merely greeting our own traits that have been placed in
our potential. |
| We create our potential through repression and suppression and we come face
to face with the destructive results of those acts. If we repress a trait into
our potential, we do not have the opportunity to explore it, and to practice
expressing it skillfully and productively. Our repressed anger could come out as
a childish tantrum. |
| Some people fear their potential's elements because they mistakenly believe
that the elements that they discover there must be acted out and accepted into
the self image. A natural impulse to punch an abusive person can be suppressed,
acknowledged but not enacted, and its existence does not make us a "bad
person." |
| The potential is not, by definition, a container for our bad qualities. It
also contains our good qualities. |
 We have good elements in our potential.
These are the positive traits within our potential. Generally our ego ideal
consists of constructive characteristics such as honesty and cordiality, because
most of us like to think of ourselves as honest and cordial. However, in some
people and in some subcultures, the contents of the ego and the potential are
reversed from what we in our society expect.
For example:
| Among criminals and gang members, the attributes that are rewarded are
villainy and violence, at least when displayed against people outside of the
gang. Honesty and cordiality are in their potential. |
| Our confidence could be in our potential because we consider ourselves to
be inadequate. |
| Our leadership ability could be in our potential, because we don't want to
assume responsibility for that ability. |
| Our ambition could be in our potential, if we accepted someone's' example of
lethargy. |
| Our creativity could be in our potential, simply because we have not had
the opportunity or time to pursue our creative interests. |
The ego and the potential balance one another.
The brighter the sun, the darker the shadow. When we increase a particular
quality in our ego, we also increase its opposite. When we try to be a good
person, we simultaneously intensify our tendency and energy for malice and
destructiveness, although we try to stifle this opposite through judgmentalness
and repression. The same dynamic occurs when we attempt to increase any virtue,
such as, humility, generosity, loving or caring. Instead of stressing one side
of a duality or cycle, and rejecting the other, we can simply revert to our true
self and perform the acts that are suggested by intuition knowing that they will
be appropriate for the situation. When we do that, we achieve wholeness rather
than polarity and repression. When we try to hard to enhance the good side of
life, without the guidance of our true self and intuition we encounter problems:
| People in the helping professions such as teaching or nursing or counseling
often experience burnout. The professionals who survive are those
who are able to detach themselves and recognize the limits of their ability to
assist other people. The non-survivors try too hard to increase the good in
people and in society and then find themselves becoming cynical and aloof in
an unconscious effort to balance their own idealism. |
We project our potential.
All projections come from the potential. Projection of potential is an
unconscious act that causes us to see the parts of our own potential as though
they belong to other people. As a result, we can deny those elements within
ourselves in order to preserve a false self image.
Projection of potential can appear in various ways:
| Family projections. These occur within the family.
 | One member can receive the projected potential of the others. This person
becomes the black sheep of the family. |
| Children receive the projections of their parents. That is one reason why a
minister's kids can be hell-raisers. |
| The family can project its collective potential outward onto other families
or groups. |
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| Projection onto our partner. Couples project their potential qualities
onto one another. In short term relationships, we might abandon the person when
those projected qualities become intolerable. In a long term relationship, we
have more of a commitment to come to terms with this person and with the
characteristics that we have projected. |
| Projection onto bad guys. These are the people we love to hate in soap
operas, horror stories, sports, and in the evening news with its criminals and
disliked politicians. When we watch a football game, we can project our
aggression. We can project our heroic qualities upon the winning team, and our
fear of failure upon the losing team. If a person with a weak ego is subjected
to the force of someone else's projected potential, the projection can overpower
that weak ego causing the person to accept the image of that projection in the
place of his or her own ego. This phenomenon is a reason why some criminals, and
other social outcasts have difficulty in breaking free from their role as the
carriers of society's potential. |
| Projections onto groups. An individual might project hated qualities onto
people of other races, other countries, other religions, other age groups, other
sexual orientations, the other gender, and so on. This promotes racism,
nationalism, ageism, sexism, etc.. |
| Scapegoating. We project our potential qualities onto another person, and
then we symbolically destroy the person, as if to destroy the qualities
themselves, through social ostracism and through dehumanization. In the past,
scapegoating was done with a real goat. The people would imagine they were
casting their unwanted qualities into the animal, and then they would kill the
animal or send it into the desert to die. |
| Paranoia. One cause for this condition is the projection of aggression
from our potential. The people onto whom we project these fears generally do not
have a hook such as an obvious trait of aggression that our projection would
exaggerate. We can experience paranoia toward strangers at random, or toward
imaginary entities such as Martians.
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 We have a collective potential.
An individual has a personal potential and a group has a collective potential
of the traits that it rejects. A group can be a family, a nation, an ethnic
group, a religion, a city, a culture or subculture, a corporation, or any other
fellowship of like minded people.
We see various manifestations of the collective potential:
| Religions create collective potentials that they project onto other religions
and onto the devil. |
| Middle class people can project potential qualities upon the extremes of both
the homeless whom they may view as irresponsible, and the rich whom they may
view as greedy. |
| The Victorian culture put sexuality into its collective potential. As society
changes, its potential changes and much of that sexuality has now been brought
into the mainstream, while prudery is more likely to be in the potential.
Similarly, the conservative U.S. culture of the 1950s put its liberalism into
its potential until the 1960s, when liberalism was brought out of its potential,
to reveal its inevitable blend of destructive and good qualities. |
| Mob psychology is based in a collective potential that contains elements such
as violence and intolerance. After the mob has disbanded, and the individuals
have disengaged from that group consciousness, many of them will have a much
milder, or even contrary attitude toward the issue that the mob supported. |
| A nation has a collective potential. One nation might have a legitimate
complaint against another, but we can detect potential projection when the other
nation is demonized. Politicians occasionally use the collective potential to
stir up emotions, and support. It is our unwillingness to confront our own
personal potential that allows politicians to manipulate us. For example:
| Former United States President Ronald Reagan called the former Soviet Union
"the Evil Empire". |
| Another former U.S. President, Richard Nixon, said, "It may seem
melodramatic to say that the United States and Russia represent Good and Evil
but if we think of it that way, it helps to clarify our perspective on the
world struggle". |
| Iranian leaders have called the United States "the Great Satan." |
| Hitler's Germany created a potential in its attempt to glorify the Aryans,
and to dismiss its own flaws through projection. The projected potential led
to the death of millions of people. |
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Next topic: Female and Male Traits
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