Taming the Little Psychopath Within Before the Shadow Bites
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
From a post-Jungian perspective, it may be more useful to imagine the psyche not as a collection of traits that we either possess or do not possess, but as a field of potentials. In each of us, there is a seed of many things: envy, grandiosity, cruelty, paranoia, madness, possessiveness, destructiveness, but also tenderness, creativity, courage, and eros. We differ perhaps less in what can exist within us than in the thresholds at which a particular potential crosses from shadow into experience, fantasy, and finally behaviour.
Fortunately, most of these seeds never acquire enough psychic energy to become dominant. They remain in the background as possibilities belonging to the wider range of human nature. But certain circumstances can lower the threshold of their activation: humiliation, fear, loss, narcissistic injury, falling in love, jealousy, exhaustion, betrayal, group identification, and power. Then something may emerge from us that feels both alien and disturbingly familiar.
This is why the Jungian Shadow is not simply what is “bad” in us. It is what the ego finds difficult to recognise as its own. The problem begins when we say, “I could never be like that.” At that point, the contents of the Shadow can easily be projected outward. The psychopath is always someone else. The narcissist is someone else. The envious one, the aggressive one, the fanatic, always someone else. We remain reasonable, moral, civilised.
A post-Jungian position would be more uncomfortable, but psychologically more fertile: I too carry the possibility of this.
We might even speak, metaphorically, of the little psychopath within. Not in the diagnostic sense of psychopathy, but as that part of the psyche capable, at a particular moment, of ceasing to experience the other as a fully human being. It is the moment when we want to hurt because we have been hurt, to humiliate because we have been humiliated, to win regardless of the cost, and to turn another person into an object of our rage. Sometimes it lasts only a few seconds. Sometimes we recognise it only after hearing our own words and thinking, “Where on earth did that come from?”
Instinctively, we want to get rid of this part. We deny it, suppress it, or feel ashamed of it. Yet this is precisely where Jungian psychology proposes another kind of relationship. We need to tame it without pretending that it has become harmless.
Perhaps the better image is that of living with a powerful, potentially dangerous animal. We learn its movements. We know what frightens it, what provokes it, and what makes it restless. We begin to recognise its approach before it fully appears, and we learn when the leash needs to be held firmly.
This requires something far more demanding than moral purity: knowledge of our own capacity for danger.
A person who knows that they can be envious has a better chance of noticing envy before it becomes the devaluation of another person. Someone who knows their own aggression can recognise the moment when injury begins to turn into a desire for revenge. Someone familiar with their own grandiosity may hear the inner voice whispering that the rules no longer apply to them. Integration of the Shadow therefore does not mean giving it freedom. Quite the opposite. Integration increases responsibility.
This is where the question of free will enters. Perhaps we are not free to choose everything that appears within us. We do not choose the first flash of envy. We do not choose every fantasy. We do not choose the instant in which anger overwhelms us, nor all the images produced by the unconscious. The psyche is much larger than the ego, and it would itself be a form of grandiosity to imagine that we completely control it.
But between the emergence of an impulse and its transformation into an action, there may be a threshold. This is where I would locate an important form of free will. Not as the absolute sovereignty of the ego over the psyche, but as the capacity to recognise what is becoming activated and, at the crucial moment, to say, “I see you. I know what you want. I understand why you have appeared. But you will not decide what I do next.”
Perhaps this is one of the ego's most mature functions. It no longer pretends that the Shadow does not exist, but neither does it hand the Shadow the steering wheel.
The little psychopath will probably always be there in some form. So will the envious child, the little tyrant, the coward, the seducer, the avenger, the puer who refuses limits, and the senex who would freeze everything into rules. Individuation does not mean their eradication. It means becoming increasingly familiar with the inner population of our psyche and refusing to allow any one of its inhabitants to declare itself the whole.
Paradoxically, a person may become less dangerous when they can tolerate knowing that they are capable of being dangerous.
Then the Shadow no longer has to approach disguised as moral certainty, righteous anger, or the conviction that the problem always lies in someone else. We can feel it while it is still approaching, notice the change in our inner temperature, take hold of the leash, and perhaps even ask what has awakened it. Then we can choose.
We cannot promise that the animal will never growl. We can learn to hear it before it bites.
Read more from Dragana Favre
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
