I see what you're getting at, and you're approaching it exactly the right way - go to the origin. Try to understand how the shadow and the persona are created in the first place. It also helps when you understand the relationship between them, because they're intimately related.
The shadow isn't only things you're afraid of, but also that you're embarrassed or ashamed of. Actually that's still a little too vague. It consists of those things that you don't want to admit are parts of you. So you split them off and pretend like they're not there - using mechanisms like denial, repression, and projection. Well projection is always associated with the shadow I think - in fact I would say anything that you project onto other people is a part of your shadow.
It helps to think of it like this - a shadow only exists because light is being cast, right? And some of it is being blocked by something. A cast shadow. Cast is another word for projected. The light is conscious awareness - it's sort of like a sun that warms and enlightens whatever it touches. But there are parts of the psyche that we are afraid or ashamed to cast full conscious light (awareness) onto, and those things we push around behind us so we don't have to see them and nobody else can see them either. If you're standing outside on a nice sunny day, you have a shadow right? So let's just say, for illustration purposes, that you're standing there and the elements of your psyche are objects sitting on the ground around you. No wait - not the elements of your psyche, we have to break it down farther to make this more clear. Let's say what's sitting around you are photographs of important events in your life - memories of events that shaped who you are.
In fact I think I can explain this better if I switch analogies. Rather than standing in a sunny field, you're sitting at a table looking through a pile of pictures of your childhood. There are other people in the room (there are other people in your life) who might walk up at any point and be able to see what you're looking at. So as you pull out each picture from the box, you either lay it right down where everybody can see it or sometimes, with certain pictures, you turn it face down or you stash it under the place mat or something because you don't want people to see that and understand that it's a part of you.
In fact, my mom used to talk about sweeping certain things under the rug. I remember conversations with her where she talked about this, and I used to picture her actually sweeping parts of her life under the rug, and I almost laughed because there was a lot she had to put under there, and I pictured people walking into her house and there's a huge cartoonish lump under the rug. They could all see it, but they kind of understood what it was, because of the way she acted - the way she'd freak out if anybody walked near it or looked at it, so they didn't do those things, in order to keep her relaxed and cool. This demonstrates the fact that often other people can see our own shadow better than we can - that's largely because they aren't trying to repress it but we are. Also because we have 'tells' - we start getting nervous or antsy when parts of the shadow become visible and people start talking about it.
So yes, it starts early in life when we decide there are certain things about us that we don't want people to see, and we hide them.
We form the shadow little by little, by deciding what we display proudly about ourselves and what we hide. Anything you hide becomes another part of your shadow. It keeps growing. And keep in mind, when we talk about the shadow as a personified figure, that's only a convenient way to describe it, and because parts of it are represented that way in dreams. A shadow figure is not really the shadow, just a representation of it. The shadow is an area in your psyche where you repress and hide things, and it is represented in dreams sometimes as a frightening or disturbing figure. This is because the way the unconscious and the conscious minds communicate is through stories - dreams are one of the ways they do it. And the stories use symbolism because the conscious mind operates differently than the unconscious - it's logical and linguistic whereas the unconscious is imaginative and intuitive. The root word of imagination is image, and that's what it means - the imagination consists of various kinds of images. This doesn't mean just still pictures - in psychological terms an image means a range of things - I think of it as something like an animated GIF with sound that also can include ideas, memories, and feelings. But just a brief little snippet usually - not like a whole movie but like a scene.
It's important to understand the difference between a dream and a movie. Dreams are the products of the unconscious, so they tell us how it functions, how it communicates with the conscious mind. A movie consists of only moving visuals and sound, but a dream also includes information - ideas, memories (real or false), and feelings. So it's in something like Sensorama . Oh, in fact, that made me realize - dreams also include all of the senses - smell, touch and taste as well as the big 2. So the pictures you were looking at in one of the earlier analogies - think of them as each including a little bit of movement and all the other elements I just listed.
In fact it goes farther than that. One of Freud's more brilliant discoveries was the association chain - the way one memory will immediately pull out a cascade of others that are closely related to it, usually through emotional content. If you remember (or dream about) some incident in your childhood that caused you embarrassment, it might also carry with it the memories of several other similar incidents that hold the same kind of embarrassment but that happened at different ages. It tends to work sort of like this - something has just happened in your life that triggered a cascade of associations. Maybe somebody called you a slut, and it reminds you immediately of several other events, all leading back to the original one, when let's say you heard your dad call your mom a slut loudly and angrily as he was accusing her of cheating on him when you were just 4. Maybe this event terrified and traumatized you. Partly because you didn't really understand it, but you knew it was something terrible, and it seemed like your family was destroyed by it. So maybe now the word is all tied up in anxious knots with terror, desperation, shame, and other emotions that you can't even name. You just remember so much anger and resentment between your parents, and so much crying and screaming, and you thought the family was over and done now and you didn't know what was going to happen to you, and it was all because of that one word. Or it seemed like it to you anyway. Maybe the family survived it, but that word and all the associations with it got pushed down into your shadow area - you never want to think about them again, and if they come up your reaction is instant and spasmodic - completely irrational and uncontrollable. You just get pissed off and hurt and want to cry uncontrollably, and maybe you don't even remember the original incident anymore - probably you've repressed that memory because it was too painful, and now you can't even really think clearly about it anymore because you get all irrational and emotional when you try.
So now anything that reminds you of that incident - a certain angry hurtful tone of voice like your dad used toward your mom in that argument, or the shocked tearful tone of your mom in response, or any of a range of hurtful words he used like slut, whore, bitch, etc - especially if they're uttered in that angry resentful hurtful tone, just automatically bring up rage and fear in you.
Ok, back to the present. Let's say you have a dream one night with Jack Nicholson and he looks very angry and evil, and as you see him you just hear the word SLUT in the dream soundtrack. You wake from this dream terrified and upset, and for some reason you're thinking about a certain toy you had in childhood. If you analyze the dream, you might remember that the toy was in your hand when this argument took place, and it's a link between something that happened yesterday and the argument. Then you realize that yesterday a friend laughingly called you a slut - not seriously at all, and you didn't get mad or anything, but maybe subliminally the association was called up in your mind. And maybe you realize that in some way your dad looked a little bit like Jack Nicholson and during the big fight maybe he reminded you of Nicholson in The Shining, where he was horrible to his wife and child, so he made a good choice for this particular shadow figure.
There's no such thing as your shadow figure - the shadow really is a place where you push down your repressed memories, and it's also an archetype. Archetypes are generators of symbolic figures that can be used in our minds stories (like dreams or thoughts), and those figures are custom tailored to a situation. Whatever the figure needs to represent specifically in a given situation (a given dream) that is what is chosen. In different dreams, when it represents a different association chain of memories and emotions, a different shadow figure will be chosen. The shadow figures themselves are only temporary representations.
Lol - I might have overdone it. And I'm not sure if you understand the mechanics of how dreams work. But it's important to have a basic understanding of these association chains. Something happens today that triggers a cascade of associations reaching all the way back to some original traumatic incident that caused you to repress some terrible event into your shadow, because you want to forget it and don't want to ever think about it again. Well, now that it's repressed it has a lot of power, and that power works against you. You don't even understand anymore why anything that reminds you of it makes you so upset (you don't know it reminds you of anything - it's repressed).
However, if you can work your way through the association chain and remember the original incident, then you're bringing the light of conscious awareness into the darkness and you undo the repression - you bring the content up into awareness and it loses that dark primitive power to inspire nothing but terror and shame and guilt. Now rather than an irrational reaction you can unravel the knots and untangle the memories and get your inner machinery working right again. This is analogous to lifting the hood on your car (it's dark under there) and fixing whatever is causing that terrible noise and making the car drive funny. You have to go in and do the work, fix whatever is wrong, even though you're afraid to go in there, and then the energy, rather than making the car wobble, will be helping it to drive properly now.
Man, these explanations are getting longer and longer! And I haven't even said everything yet - this was just setting it up! I'm going to break here and start another post - this one is long enough already - back in a flash!
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