In providing a corrective to the often misleading and misled persona, the shadow often operates as a trickster or jokester, messing with our sense of a rational, thoughtful, and usually error-free persona. Much as our shadow does a great job of buffering our grandiose sense of self-worth by making us stumble over our words during a conference presentation or provide a “Freudian slip” in an article we are writing for a prestigious journal, so it can distract us from a business offering (with a headache or set of bad dreams). We might find the shadow doing its work on our calculation of a budget (leaving out an obvious financial factor). We make something similar to a “Freudian slip” in our miscalculation of the potential revenues in preparing a business plan or failing to mention one of our potential donors in preparing a proposal for funding the new wing in our local museum.
Much as the shadow can provide this corrective function concerning the aspirations and operations of our persona, the power and complexity of shadow functions in the Jungian psyche go much deeper and provide even greater insights about money and its potential enthrallment. His deeper probe benefits from the insights on the psychology of religion offered by Rudolph Otto.
Otto’s Numinous
In alignment with Berdyaev’s “chasm” is Rudolph Otto’s Numinous. In what some scholars identify as the first “psychological” analysis of religious experiences, Otto identified something he called the numinous experience. In his now-classic book, The Idea of the Holy, Otto (1923) creates a new word, “numinous”, combining the Latin words “numen” with the word “ominous”. Otto (1923, p. 11) writes about a powerful, enthralling experience that is “felt as objective and outside the self.” His numinous experience is simultaneously awe-some and awe-full. We are enthralled and repelled. We feel powerless in the presence of the numinous—yet we seem to gain power (“inspiration”) from participation in its wonderment.
Using more contemporary psychological terms, we propose that the boundaries between internal and external loci of control are shattered when one is enmeshed in a numinous experience. The outside enters the inside, and the inside is drawn to the outside. In Jungian terms. our inner psyche is drawn outward by the numinous experience; it confiscates this experience and brings it back inside, where it becomes even more frightening and threatening to the ongoing integration of various parts of the psyche. It is through numinous experiences that deeply embedded archetypes residing in our unconscious are activated.
Residing in the shadow domain of our unconscious, negative archetypes can be potentiated by the appearance of money. The archetype of chaos is readily activated, related to the loss of money. This archetype evokes images of the inundating flood, leading to massive destruction (Neumann, 1954). The complementary archetype of Satan evokes images of powerful evil forces that are sweeping in to fill the void (chaos) and take command, leading to Armageddon. These compelling positive and negative images swirl around one another, creating a confusing and ultimately quite frightening intra-psychic monetary storm.
The Psychic Storm: What does this psychic storm look like? We can get some sense of the storm’s nature by looking at its more benevolent manifestation. Jung (and Otto) would suggest that the storm takes place when we are transported to another domain of experience while listening to a Bach mass or an opera by Mozart or Puccini (depending on our “taste,” i.e., amenability). This type of psychic storm is a numinous-inducing experience. We view a miracle in the form of a newborn child or the recovery of a loved one from a life-threatening disease. This leads us to a sense of the numinous.
