I wanted to like Bly so much. He's a good poet, and (in contrast to his cartoonish reputation as a drum-circle men's advocacy godfather) seems to have a good handle on the mysterious power of age-old gender stereotypes over the human psyche. (Jungians call these stereotypes archetypes.) Unfortunately, this book is blather and twaddle. Blather: he frequently interrupts his arguments to quote approvingly and at length from his own poetry, which he clearly sees as God's primary gift to the modern world. Twaddle: well, consider this: "Thousands, even millions of men projected their internal feminine on to Marilyn Monroe. If a million men do that, and leave it there, it's likely she will die. She died. Projections without personal contact can damage the person receiving them....We have to say also that Marilyn Monroe called for these projections as part of her power longing...In the economy of the psyche her death was inevitable and even right. No single human being can carry so many projections—that is, so much unconsciousness—and survive." If you can read such stuff without projecting the book, quite consciously, into the nearest trash can, hats off to you. ( )

Wonderful little book on jungian psychology and philosophy. In particular the idea of the human shadow. (Not a literal shadow lol) ( )

A very short and easy to read discussion on the Jungian concept of the archetypal shadow. No psychobabble in this book though and you feel like Bly is a great mentor casually chatting with you and your friends over some beers in the study. Highly recommended in this day where we tend to project our dark half onto others and then say, "It's all their doing! Not me!" ( )

The book talks about the psychological concept of the shadow, or shadow self. This is an idea that was put forth by C.G. Jung, the great psychoanalyst. The shadow is the part of you, and every human being, that is more-or-less your "dark side", or the part of you that people claim doesn't exist or won't admit that it does. Bly, through his writings, tries to show you how and why you should integrate with your shadow, and to not deny or suppress it.

A wonderful book, I only wish it was a lot longer. ( )

Robert Bly has this wonderful Jungian lens through which he sees the world. Here he is discussing the subconscious mind, which he represents with the metaphor of the shadow. The book is distilled from three or four poetry readings he gave in the 1970s. He wants us to be in touch with our dark side, meaning the subconcious. The metaphor of the shadow he sees is also a bag in which we are forced to put every personal attribute not desired by our parents, who want us to be only "nice." Yet we are essentially wild animals at heart. What should we do with all that anger, rage, sexuality, creativity, whatever, that we've been forced to suppress? Well, when we get to about 35 or 40, Bly says, we have to start taking things out of the bag. Unless we take them out, unless we address them, we will become damaged. Please don't read this book if you've never had a psychology course or have not familiarized yourself with psychological concepts through reading, esp. Jungian ones. Those without such a background are likely to see Bly as little more than a raving lunatic. He is not. What I found fascinating (again) was how very discursive Bly's thought process is. He's been thinking in Jungian terms for so long that his analysis, essentially cultural analysis, psychohistory, can be a little dense at times. This is one of those books that you have to absorb over time, reflect upon, pick up again, and re-read. Fortunately it's only 81 pages long. ( )