Transforming Life-Draining Inner Conflicts Into a Source of Creative Energy: A Jungian Perspective
Jungian psychology views life-draining inner conflicts as a source of creative energy.
Learn how and why in this practical guide.
What are inner conflicts?
Inner conflicts exist wherever our conscious mind clashes with incompatible desires, fears, values, or complexes in the unconscious.
You’re probably experiencing an inner conflict when you feel conflicted – that is, holding contradictory desires or values simultaneously.
This is possible because the totality of the psyche is huge and varied. It comprises different components (of which the ego is just one) that desire and fear different things.
In fact, the conscious ego represents a tiny fraction of our total personality. Jung compared the conscious mind to the tip of an iceberg, with the vast majority of the personality lying under the surface in the unconscious mind.
As we’ll see, inner conflicts are an inevitable part of being human.
What causes inner conflicts?
We all experience inner conflicts.
Put broadly, they’re a byproduct of our pluralistic inner lives.
More specifically, psychic fragmentation causes inner conflicts as we form our conscious identities. In this way, they can represent repressed or undiscovered parts of ourselves that want to be heard and integrated.
Let’s look at each of these points in more detail.
Inner conflicts are a byproduct of our pluralistic inner lives
In Inner Work, Robert Johnson reminds us that our inner lives are pluralistic:
‘We know that, although we seem to be individuals, we are actually plural beings. Each of us has a great multitude of distinct personalities coexisting within one body, sharing one psyche.‘
It recalls Whitman's Song of Myself:
‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)’
We all have in-built, contradictory desires for things like:
Comfort and adventure
Moderation and excess
Community and isolation
Financial success and purpose
The material and the spiritual
Each value is, on the surface at least, incompatible with its opposite, making conflict inevitable.
It’s an unavoidable part of being a human, where a diversity of desires and personalities all want to be heard and enacted.
Inner conflicts as a byproduct of conscious ego formation
Our conscious identity forms as we adapt to our culture and environment.
We tend to adopt and identify with the values that make our lives easier and repress the parts of ourselves that make us vulnerable. If we want to win approval, we repress the prospect of confronting people; if we want to be accepted, we repress the prospect of doing anything ‘unacceptable’, and so on.
These decisions are all made unconsciously, raising a paradox at the heart of depth psychology: your conscious identity is the result of unconscious behaviour and decisions.
In Becoming Whole, Jungian analyst Bud Harris writes:
‘This is how we generally develop in the first half of life. The better I am at adapting, the better I am at cutting away opposing thoughts, feelings, and characteristics that might get me in trouble or into a conflict. At some level, we want our lives to be problem and conflict-free in order to function smoothly and feel safe.’
We adapt to the world we find ourselves in, and that adaptation shapes us in a one-sided way, as it causes us to repress parts of ourselves that threaten our sense of safety and security.
The aspects of the personality that the conscious ego represses, which includes both positive and negative qualities, form the shadow.
The ego and the shadow exist in conflict
Inner conflicts refer to the struggle between opposing forces in the conscious and unconscious. This is best exemplified in the tension between the ego and the shadow.
The shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that contradicts the ego ideal.
The ego and the shadow exist in conflict, and the former will often repress, resist or project the latter rather than face it, because it embodies all the qualities it deems unacceptable or ‘out of character’.
To summarise, the formation of a conscious identity naturally creates a shadow.
Like all structures, the ego forms by exclusion. Those excluded qualities then embody a separate, opposing psychic structure – the shadow – that exists in tension with the ego.
If we all have inner conflicts, why are they an issue?
Inner conflicts aren’t an issue in themselves, but become a problem when we ignore or repress them.
Again, I’ll approach this from a broader position, considering the pluralism of our inner lives, and then get more specific with how repression relates to the tension between ego and shadow.
Repressing conflicts diminishes us as people
We know by now our inner lives are pluralistic, so we all carry conflicting obligations and incompatible desires.
When these conflicts come to the surface, we often ignore or repress them rather than face them, because facing them means acknowledging something we don’t want to acknowledge, either about ourselves or our lives.
But repression breeds illusion and untruth, and the cost of repression is an illusory and untruthful life: a fiction.
We may see this fiction as a better option than something ‘true’, because it means we can avoid facing realities about ourselves and our lives that will cause pain.
But living a lie diminishes us – makes us, like the persona in one of my favourite Smiths songs, half a person. We can’t be clear, authentic, or driven about what really matters, because what really matters has never been expressed or allowed to grow.
‘Conflicted’ is another way of saying ‘fragmented’, and it’s hard to live fulfilling and happy lives in this psychological state. Our psychic energy pulls us in different directions, leaving us lost, confused, and drained.
The point is, some psychological states are life-draining, while others are life-giving. Repressed inner conflict is an exhausting and painful psychological state, while inner harmony is invigorating – an endless source of joy and love.
Unresolved conflicts between ego and shadow keep us stuck
We've seen how the shadow is made up of both positive and negative qualities that were rejected as we formed identities that served us in our early environments and cultures.
If the ego represses any qualities contrary to its ideal, we’re bound to face challenges whenever life demands a response that calls for qualities that exist outside this ideal.
For instance, if the conscious ego rejects vulnerability, the inner conflict associated with accepting feelings of vulnerability will likely make any relevant situations difficult. The qualities themselves can vary, but the experience is the same: the ego doesn’t want to act in ways that don’t align with its values, so we naturally feel tension whenever life calls for us to do so.
It’s easy to see how this conflict between ego and shadow creates obstacles in life. To embody a shadow quality is the feeling of acting out of character.
Almost any notable change in life demands this. Obstacles require us to change and adapt, which means calling on qualities outside of the ego and embodying a different character to the one that’s stuck.
The point is, the ego isn’t necessarily correct. Your personality is shaped by environmental and cultural conditions and unconscious forces – not something essential. The fact that the ego consciousness wants or fears a particular thing is rooted in this very specific personal history, not something transcendent or ideal that pulls you towards what’s right for you.
Like all closed systems, the ego replicates itself. When you live from ego consciousness alone, you live a one-sided life that will likely face similar problems or patterns.
Closed systems eventually become sterile, rigid, and predictable. Similarly, when our egos are in conflict with our repressed, shadow elements, life can feel dull and stagnant, as we’re unlikely to change.
To navigate this, the borders of the ego have to become porous, allowing the exchange and cross-contamination of psychic contents.
Open borders allow us to acknowledge, retrieve, and integrate shadow qualities into the conscious personality – a powerful source of renewal.
This brings us to individuation.
Becoming whole through Jungian individuation
Jung used the term ‘individuation’ to describe the lifelong process of becoming more whole, authentic, and fulfilled people.
Individuation involves the conscious recognition, reclamation, and integration of unconscious aspects of the psyche.
Individuation is a way to become less fragmented, integrating the contradictory parts of ourselves into a more unified whole.
The result is that we have a better idea of who we are, we’re more certain about our decisions and values, and we tap into the fountain of life energy that accompanies this psychological state.
How individuation relates to inner conflicts
Earlier, I stated that being conflicted is akin to being fragmented.
By changing the language, we can better align with the imagery of individuation: if inner conflict is the state of being fragmented and individuation is a process of becoming whole, then individuation is a method of resolving inner conflict.
Harris discusses the Jungian idea of the compensatory perspective of the unconscious – that is, the way in which our unconscious gives us clues – through dreams, fears, longings, emotions, and so on – into the parts of ourselves that need to be recognised, reclaimed from the shadow and integrated into the personality for us to become a more whole, authentic person.
The below quotes are taken from Becoming Whole:
'It is important that we realise that if we refuse to recognise the help and assistance from our unconscious and rigidly live out of our ego alone, we will be living in a state of continuous error in how we understand ourselves and perceive our lives.
...But when our unconscious begins to urge us toward wholeness around mid-life, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, the characteristics and potentials we have repressed or denied seem to be coming back to haunt us. As these parts of ourselves are struggling to emerge, they threaten our idea of how we have defined ourselves, and thrust us into the need to change who we are, how we live – and into the contradictions this necessity brings.'
Harris continues with a stark warning against ignoring the unconscious and the importance of opening up the borders of the ego:
‘Now, it doesn’t take much insight to see that if we don’t open our consciousness – our egos – to this growth we will force our denied conflicts out into the world around us and project our shadow characteristics onto our partners, our children, and others, or we will force them into our bodies as physical problems. Repressed shadow conflicts easily become physical problems. This needed opening of our personality takes courage because we must lower the psychological defences that give us our sense of security and safety, in order to incarnate a greater sense of conscious wholeness.’
In the mythic sense, inner conflicts are calls to adventure, and repressing them ignores the call.
When the hero ignores the mythic call, he’s consigned to the wasteland, destined to stagnate. In the same way, repressing the call of an inner conflict maintains the psychological status quo, precluding growth or transformation.
Let’s explore what ‘answering the call’ looks like from a Jungian perspective.
How to turn inner conflicts into a source of creative energy
Jung recognised that we all have conflicting values and desires, describing this as 'the tension of opposites'.
Reflecting on Jung's insight, Harris describes how confronting this tension can ignite a transformation:
'Jung’s idea is that if we have the courage to develop the characteristics of, and the arguments for, each side of the contradiction – which means to bring each opposite pole into full conscious awareness – and then hold these two in full consciousness – then the tension between these opposing perspectives will become a source of new creative energy in the unconscious that will give us a solution that is beyond what we could have figured out rationally. Jung labelled this process “the transcendent function”.'
To continue with the mythic metaphor, answering the call of a conflict means fully acknowledging both sides of the conflict and developing them (writing them down in detail is probably best).
The idea is that, when held in consciousness, the pair will synthesise, and a kind of ‘third thing’ will emerge. It echoes Hegel’s dialectic – the idea that development is a process of opposing ideas interacting (thesis - antithesis - synthesis). I talk more about how Hegel relates to Jung in the article below:
It's as though consciously holding a tension taps into a current deep within us, summoning a force we didn't know we possessed. Jung called this ‘the transcendent function’.
Activating the transcendent function
The transcendent function is Jung’s name for the process that enables a transition from one psychological state to another.
It involves deliberately integrating the psyche's conscious and unconscious elements into a third position, which marks a new stage in the evolution of the personality.
The transcendent function is a way of using this tension as a source of creative energy in our psychological development.
Harris outlines the 4-step formula for activating the transcendent function:
1. Fully engage in life
Accept that suffering and all its manifestations are vital parts of life and necessary to transformation, rather than trying to avoid them.
2. Reflect upon your life
Develop your awareness of the contradictions that arise in life rather than repressing them. Amplify them, explore them, and hold them fully in your awareness. Journal, reflect on dreams, and use active imagination.
3. Bear the burden of the conflict
Avoiding or repressing suffering causes neuroses. Jung taught that suffering is a natural part of life and is something we have to bear. Holding the conflict between opposing forces can help us reach the solutions we need.
4. Live the transformation
Live the realisations you gain so that your life is an expression of your expanded consciousness.
An approach to life
Jung envisioned individuation as an approach to life, not something that could be completed.
We’ll never run out of conflicts, so a life committed to transforming them comes down to a life committed to growing self-awareness.
This means:
Acknowledging conflicts honestly
Amplifying them through practices like journaling and active imagination
Meditating on these contradictions
Living the results
This is the Jungian perspective on transforming conflicts from life-draining to life-giving, as it’s a model that uses suffering as a vehicle to expand our consciousness and enrich our personality.
As always, I’d recommend reading the books mentioned if you’re interested in learning more.
Jung’s view on suffering being necessary is interesting, particularly from a Buddhist viewpoint - the ending of suffering being the goal of the Buddha. Are the two incompatible I wonder? I find much of value in both.