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Japanese Christians are divided on it. Shadow work, facing the traits a person hides or denies, comes from the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s idea of the “shadow,” and Scripture never mentions it. Some Christian writers, such as the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, use it. Others, including a 2003 Vatican document on the New Age, criticize Jung’s teaching on God and evil.
Whatever we make of Jung, the wish behind shadow work is an old one: to see what we hide from ourselves. The Bible knows that wish well, and it does not leave us to do the looking alone. “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” the psalmist prays (Psalm 139:23). In Scripture the searching is God’s work, and what he brings to light is met with forgiveness.
What is shadow work?
Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, used “the shadow” for the parts of the personality that a person does not recognize or does not want to own. The reference work A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (1986) calls this his most direct definition: the shadow is “the thing a person has no wish to be.” In Aion (1951) Jung wrote: “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.”
In Jung’s scheme the shadow is not only bad. The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis notes that it “can also have a positive side,” and a 2023 report in The Guardian gave the example of a love of poetry left to languish by someone steered toward a career in science.
The phrase “shadow work” is now used more loosely, for journaling and self-help exercises about one’s hidden motives and reactions. The Shadow Work Journal, a self-published workbook of writing prompts by Keila Shaheen, spread on TikTok in 2023. Its author told The Guardian that “the journal is not a strict interpretation of Jung’s work” and that it is “not meant to be a replacement for formal analysis.” Some therapists quoted in the same report cautioned that it is no substitute for mental health care.
What does the Bible say about shadow work?
The Bible does not mention shadow work or anything like Jung’s theory of the psyche. It does speak often of faults a person cannot see in himself. “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults,” the psalmist prays (Psalm 19:12). Psalm 139:23–24 asks God to do the searching: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” Jeremiah 17:9–10 says that “the heart is deceitful above all things” and that the Lord is the one who searches it.
Jesus taught that evil comes from within: “out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–22). He told his hearers to “first take the log out of your own eye” before judging a brother (Matthew 7:5). Paul told the Corinthians to “examine yourselves” (2 Corinthians 13:5) and to examine themselves before the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:28), but he also wrote that his own clear conscience settled nothing: “I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Corinthians 4:4).
In these passages the one who finally searches the heart is God, and what a person finds is to be confessed: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Paul calls the change that follows putting off “your old self” and putting on “the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22–24).
Is shadow work a sin?
Scripture does not call it a sin, because it does not speak of it at all. The Christian writers who object to shadow work object to Jung’s religious ideas and his account of evil. Those who use it, such as Rohr, present it as part of God’s work of changing a person.
Catholic teaching has its own practice for looking honestly at one’s sins, the examination of conscience. The Catechism says that confession “ought to be prepared for by an examination of conscience made in the light of the Word of God” (1454), and it describes repentance as “a radical reorientation of our whole life” that includes “a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed” (1431). Jung, in the passage from Aion quoted above, aimed at recognition: “recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.” The Catechism aims at conversion, “a conversion to God with all our heart” (1431).
Christian writers who use the idea
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, writes often about the shadow. “Shadow work is what I call ‘falling upward,’” he wrote in a 2019 meditation, borrowing the title of his 2011 book, and in another he wrote that “the shadow is not inherently evil or wrong.” In a 2021 meditation on the Gospels he wrote that “the God of the Bible is best known for transmuting and transforming our shadow selves into our own more perfect good.” John A. Sanford (1929–2005), an Episcopal priest who was also a Jungian analyst, applied the idea to Christian teaching on evil in Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality (1981).
Victor White (1902–1960), an English Dominican priest, corresponded and worked with Jung for years, and Jung called him “my white raven.” The two came to disagree over evil. White held the classical Christian teaching, from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that evil is the absence of a good that should be there, while Jung held that evil is a real force in its own right. White reviewed Jung’s Answer to Job critically in the Dominican journal Blackfriars in 1955.
Christian critics of shadow work
The 2003 Vatican document Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life, issued by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and for Interreligious Dialogue, names Jung among the forerunners of New Age thought. Quoting the historian Wouter Hanegraaff, it says Jung “not only psychologized esotericism but he also sacralized psychology,” producing “a body of theories which enabled people to talk about God while really meaning their own psyche.” Its glossary adds that “C.G. Jung saw evil as the ‘shadow side’ of the God who, in classical theism, is all goodness.” The document’s reading list includes the Jesuit Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age (1992), a critique of Jungian psychology in the Church.
The Vatican document does not mention shadow work by name or call it demonic; its criticism is aimed at Jung’s ideas and at his place in the history of Western esotericism. The historian Richard Noll made a related criticism in The Jung Cult, arguing, as The Guardian summarized it, that Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious “veered too much into religious and occult territory to be considered purely psychologically descriptive.”
Christians will go on weighing Jung. The prayer for a searched heart belongs to all of them, and it ends with a request to be led: “see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:24).
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