Naruto’s Shadow — What Naruto Teach Us About Psychology
Naruto is a popular Japanese manga and anime series written by Mashashi Kishimoto. It portrays the journey of Uzumaki Naruto, a young and ambitious ninja from the Konoha Village as he navigates through hardship and friendship conundrums along the way to achieve his lifelong dream — to be the Hokage, leader of the village.
The story of Naruto offers a profound depiction of the Shadow, a psychological concept developed by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology and is still deeply revered in the field of psychology. The shadow is the set of traits we don’t (want to) identify with ourselves and the ‘dark side’ of our personality. During our early formative years, influenced by our environment, we internalised certain moral values and cultural norms into our consciousness. When we harbour thoughts and desires that seemingly go against those values and norms, we suppress it. Unbeknown to us, these suppressed thoughts accumulate behind-the-scenes in our consciousness and subsequently build up the shadow personality. Because we generally reject and are rejected for unethical and negative behaviours, the shadow is more likely to be a malevolent reservoir. The shadow, thus, is the Mr Hyde to our Dr Jekyll.
To give you an idea of your own shadow, think about what you find irritating in other people and what seems to trigger you easily and rile you up. This is known as ‘projection’. What we bury deep in ourselves, we are more likely to notice in others and sometimes amplify its significance. Examples are egotism, excessive obsession with status, possessions, or money and illusory fantasies.
“The shadow — that hidden, repressed, for the most part, inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors.” — Carl Jung
Since this is not a lecture about the shadow, let’s turn our attention back to Naruto. From his childhood years to early adulthood, Naruto’s character has always been utterly positive: protecting your friend, justice, integrity, the symbol of good and hope. This one-sidedness is finally challenged when he had to learn to control Kyubi’s (aka the Nine-Tail Fox) power in preparation for the big war.
Mini-interval: Here is the video link to the scenes I will be referring to from this point on: Naruto Fight the Dark Naruto in the Water Fall of Truth
In this scene, Naruto is faced off with an enemy who looks just like him, revealed to be ‘his true self that lives inside his heart’. He is vengeful, heart filled with hatred and pain. In contrast to Naruto’s light, he is the shadow. Naruto is seemingly surprised by his existence-it is a fact that most people are oblivious to their shadow.
“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.” — Carl Jung
The one rule in the game of shadow is that the more you repress it, the stronger it gets. By ‘repress’, I mean to hide it and reduce its embodiment in one’s conscious life. Initially, Naruto tries to fight his dark counterpart-an allegory which I interpret as him attempting to repress it. As we can see, fighting it is to no avail. The shadow is as strong as us, like Yin and Yang. Naruto then chooses to embrace the shadow with open arms and eventually integrates with him. Here we see an example of what to do beyond gaining awareness of the shadow-the assimilation. The assimilation of one’s shadow with one’s self is the process of being aware of its presence but not identifying with it. One thing for sure: Naruto made it look easy. Confronting your darkness and embracing it ain’t no easy feat for the average person in the real world. Hard? Yes. But it is the next best step forward upon acknowledging your dark side to be a bit more complete.
Eventually, beyond assimilation, Naruto mastered the power of Kyubi and reached a higher state. In our world, this higher state perhaps lies in knowing ourselves a little bit more. Start by recognising our projections. I’ll leave you with two snippets from Jung on the shadow.
“The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman Objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most, it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity, the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.”
“We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.”
