ABSTRACT
Shadow is a Jungian concept that entails the hidden and inferior parts of one’s personality as well as positive, as yet unrealized parts. To avoid neurotic one-sidedness, every human being has an interest to know and integrate shadow. Adult replacement children can face archetypal and personal shadow contents, living unconsciously in the tension between Thanatos and Eros. These archetypal forces need to be differentiated from their amalgamated state and experienced consciously and in natural order: first, living one’s own life, and death coming into view eventually, towards the end. Replacement children who have introjected a projected image of Cain (who slayed Abel, Genesis 4:10) may carry not only an internalized, often unconscious image of victim but also that of perpetrator. Conscious integration of such negative aspects of shadow, but also of the positive shadow the unique and original personality to be uncovered in self-realization allows an adult replacement child to become whole. Jung’s vision of a Sacrificial Murder in the Red Book illustrates how an adult replacement child may feel when separated from his or her soul. As paradoxical as it may sound, a replacement child may have to “kill” symbolically the representation of the “dead other” that has usurped its soul so that it may find access to true self. Understanding the symbols in the unconscious of a replacement child can be a life-saver while an alienated self may put at risk an ego that does not incarnate it.
