The Deepwater disaster as a collective waking dream

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

I’ve been following the Deepwater Horizon disaster with increasing feelings of dread, sadness, and horror as the oil continues to pour into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico with no viable plan on the part of BP, the US government, or any other party for stopping it. Even if the flow of oil was stopped today, the damage that’s already been done is incalculable, and I have yet to see any comprehensive plan from any party for dealing with that either. Every attempt by BP to address the blowout at the wellhead has failed miserably, and the US government is completely paralyzed from the top down at the worst possible time as the entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico, and all of the associated man-made systems that are directly reliant upon it, are put to their death before our very eyes. If the oil moves up the East Coast and into the North Atlantic, as some have predicted, or even more likely, if one or more severe hurricanes enter the Gulf this summer, the catastrophe could increase exponentially in scale as well as scope.

Those are some of the physical realities and consequences of the situation, but I also find myself compelled to consider the Deepwater disaster metaphorically, as a collective waking dream. In my interpretation of this group dream, the water of the Gulf represents the collective American unconscious, and the oil thousands of feet below the surface the collective American shadow. That shadow, which had previously been controlled and contained, is now gushing upward through the collective unconscious, permeating every level as it makes its way to the surface, to consciousness. This powerful mass of psychic energy, this collective shadow, can no longer be denied. It must be seen and addressed, in its purest and rawest form, and we must reevaluate our relationship with it, and deal with the consequences of our failure to do so properly in the past.

The corporate and political gods in America have been tapping and channeling our collective shadow for decades now, packaging it, marketing it, selling it, and using it to manipulate our deepest desires and our worst fears for their own gain, a process that has been greatly intensified in the nearly nine years since 9/11 allegedly “changed everything.” But playing with, and preying upon, the collective shadow of a people is a dangerous game. The line between controlling such a mass shadow for one’s own ends and turning it loose is fine indeed, and once it’s been turned loose, the illusion of controlling it is laid bare and the damage to the culture, its people, and all related systems (environmental, material, etc.) is inevitably and inexorably severe, as numerous examples throughout centuries of human history have amply demonstrated.

Every group of human beings, whether a family, a business, a political group, or an entire culture, has a shadow, just as every individual does. And just as in the case of an individual, the long-term health and viability of any group of human beings is largely dependent upon how it relates to its shadow, whether it represses it, manipulates it, or deals with it honestly and directly, and to what extent, and when. As Americans, we tend to want to look up rather than down, out rather than in, and forward rather than back. But moving in one direction to the exclusion of the other precludes balance, and always looking up, out, and forward leaves us vulnerable, as individuals and as a nation, to those parts of ourselves and energies within us that we barely know, if we are aware of them at all. Worse still, we may attempt to manipulate and control those unknown or barely known parts and energies, as if they were mere raw materials that are somehow separate from us, to be harvested and used until they burst forth into our lives and our consciousness with a force, and with consequences, we never saw coming.

Our shadow, whether individual or collective, is not evil and it is not our enemy. As psychologist Carolyn Kaufman has written, “Carl Jung believed that in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity.” Our shadow is a primal, elemental part of who we are, that part of our selves and our history, our very life and our very life force itself, that we have disowned and forgotten, for whatever reason. It is the part of us that remains unknown and unclaimed. We each need to know our shadow, to accept it, to honor it, and to accept the benefits and the consequences of its presence in our psyches and our lives in order to be fully conscious, fully integrated, and fully who we are, both as individuals and as a collective. I see the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster as yet one more very dramatic reminder that it is incumbent upon each and every one of us, as Americans and as individuals, to do our shadow work now, because I believe that to the extent we do not, what remains unresolved and unacknowledged in our inner world (individual and collective) will continue to find its way into our outer world in forms that are increasingly dangerous, damaging, and toxic to all.

Addendum (06/19/10): I continue to be extremely irritated by the prevalent and ongoing use of the term “spill” to describe the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. This is not a spill. If I knock over a glass of water on the table in my home, I’d call it a spill. If a pipe bursts in my home and water is gushing out of it uncontrollably and spreading into the nearby houses for 45 days, I’d call it a flood.

The The Deepwater disaster as a collective waking dream by Rick Belden, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.