[19] These projections insulate and delude individuals in society by acting as a symbolically deployed barrier between the ego and the ego-less Real.
This projection frequently identifies with the figure of the Devil as the "fourth" aspect of the Pauline-Christian trinity, functioning as its grounding myth.
"[37] If "the breakdown of the persona constitutes the typical Jungian moment both in therapy and in development,"[38] it is this that opens the road to the shadow within, coming about when "beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty...as if the initial encounter with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of time.
"[30]: 170 Jung considered as a perennial danger in life that "the more consciousness gains in clarity, the more monarchic becomes its content...the king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness"[39]: 334 – his shadow – which the "dissolution of the persona" sets in motion.
"The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself",[41]: 284 whether consciously or unconsciously, and represents "a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.
Jung considered merging with the shadow as typically bad, viewing it as the process of the suppressed id overwriting or controlling the ego.
As the process continues, and "the libido leaves the bright upper world... sinks back into its own depths... below, in the shadows of the unconscious.
"[45][full citation needed] The effect of such "confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective ... nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia.
"[39] Consequently, as Jung knew from personal experience: "In this time of descent – one, three, seven years, more or less – genuine courage and strength are required",[46] with no certainty of emergence.
"Non-identification demands considerable moral effort [which] prevents a descent into that darkness"; and though "the conscious mind is liable to be submerged at any moment in the unconscious...understanding acts like a life-saver.
"The integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process... without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible.
"[51] Conversely, "to the degree in which the shadow is recognised and integrated, the problem of the anima, i.e., of relationship, is constellated,"[41]: 270n and becomes the centre of the individuation quest.