"Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty"

“Life is born only of the spark of opposites,” wrote Carl Jung, the Swiss analytic psychologist. The two opposing forces that he referred to were the conscious mind and what he called “the shadow” —a collection of all-too-often repressed traits, the existence of which most of us deny. Its hazy and indistinct contours contain “all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide,” from arrogance to greed, recklessness and illicit urges. And despite any efforts to the contrary, Jung proposed that this inner Caliban—one’s Puckish side—cannot be silenced or bottled up. It will make itself known to each of us in myriad ways, whether as strange figures appearing in dreams or, most commonly, through projections of those denied traits and qualities onto others.

“Projections chan...