The Psychology of the Secret’s Secrets – Shadow and Persona

According to Jung, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Sites and applications like Secret allow us to see the shadow of others and, perhaps, find a little of our own shadow in these secrets of others or express our own.

Hello friends!

About a week ago I downloaded the application for iOS Secret, whose description says: “Share with friends, anonymously”, that is, when creating an account you automatically add your facebook friends who are already in the system and, with that, you can see your secrets as well as you can post your secrets – or whatever you want – anonymously, without being identified. With this, the application fulfills a demand created by facebook itself, which requires that all posts be identified by the user who made them. In addition, according to Facebook’s privacy policy, each profile must be the profile of a real person. Anonymous and fakes are not allowed and are deleted.

What’s curious about an app like this is that many people like to share their most intimate secrets, as long as they’re not tracked. In one of the old Orkut communities, the Confessional, anyone could post without being discovered. But what’s even more interesting than the desire to share your secrets is watching what are these secrets.

This week, as I took a look at the secrets published by friends and friends of friends on Secret, I saw a certain pattern. This pattern can be related to the theory of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

The Psychology of the Secret’s Secrets

The most common thing I’ve seen – it would be interesting to do a statistical analysis – in Secret’s secrets are erotic confessions. I would imagine that about 50% percent of posts or more feature some fantasy, desire, or disclosure of what you like and don’t like in bed. According to other newspaper and magazine articles, it seems that some users even share intimate photos of former relationships (which is illegal and goes against the application’s policy).

Others like to speak ill of colleagues and friends, so badly that the withdrawal of Secret in Brazil was considered as a probable inciter of alleged virtual bullying. And, finally, there are the posts that aim to get likes (in Secret, to like it, you have to press a heart), which seems a paradox because the person wants to be very popular even though he is anonymous.

The Psychology of the Persona and the Shadow

To understand the psychology of secrets – in Secret or elsewhere – we must understand the concepts of persona and shadow from CG Jung’s Analytical Psychology. In summary, we can say that the persona is constructed from what is socially valued. We learn to say good morning, good afternoon, good night. But also, from childhood, we learn what can be said and done in public and what must not be said or done (perhaps not even hidden).

Thus, what we can say and do publicly constitutes the persona. And what we cannot speak or do constitutes the shadow (Schatten🇧🇷 The persona is the mask, what others see in us. We can easily see the persona mask when we think about a career pattern of behavior. So, the person behaves like a dentist, like a teacher, like a general, etc.

The shadow, on the other hand, is made up of all the tendencies that are left out, that must never be presented. But it’s not just for others. Many of the shadow aspects turn out to be so repressed that they are unknown to the person himself. With that, a good part of Analytical Psychology therapy goes towards the integration of the shadow, because the more awareness a person has of these excluded contents, the more he will know himself and the more he will accept himself.

The tendency is for the shadow to be projected onto other people when it is not known. That’s why Jung said: “Everything that irritates us in others can lead us to a better knowledge of ourselves”. So, to get a little closer to our persona, a simple exercise is to observe what we (and others) are fighting, fighting against, criticizing. Or what we say when no one will know we said it – like in Secret.

In this sense, the shadow explains the part of Secret’s publications that aim to criticize another person (which was suggested as virtual bullying). The typical erotic content that appears in this type of online confessional also ends up being shadow content – ​​but more conscious – to the extent that society normally restricts the manifestation of sexuality for privacy. That is, as the publication of what one likes or dislikes, what one does or does not do, is not valued, the person keeps it to himself, for his privacy or, as long as he is sure that secrecy will be maintained (like in Secret or in a psychoanalysis), she opens up and reveals her perversions, desires and fantasies.

Conclusion

Sites and apps like Secret are interesting because they allow a series of contents to be made aware. Despite the eventual risks of hurting someone or being hurt in an anonymous review, what is published, the typical secret content, ends up bringing more light to the shadow.

In Jung’s Analytical Psychology, what is sought is not supposed perfection, an ideal. As Jung wrote many times, the path of Analytical Psychology is that of totality, that is, what we experience through our persona, our character that other people can see (whether in the profession, at school, in college, as a child or daughter, as a father or mother, as a neighbor, etc.) is just a part of our totality.

Another equally important part is what is left out of the persona, what is not socially accepted, but also and mainly what is reserved by society itself as having a specific place (as in the case of sexuality). Thus, Secret presents a curious proposal, of social sharing of what society itself believes should not be shared.

Finally, a quote from Jung about the shadow:

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, there is always an opportunity to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in touch with other interests, so it is continually subject to change. But if it is repressed and cut off from consciousness, is never corrected, and may erupt suddenly in a moment of unconsciousness. Either way, it forms an unconscious hindrance, impeding our best-intentioned purposes (CW 11, para 131).

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