By Danielle Cole

Stephen King is acutely adept at peering down the dark tunnel to the nefarious side of humanity.  He creates characters that are capable of serious atrocities through innate evil nature: think of the clown in It or Cujo; or by developing into evil: Jack’s gradual decline into a homicidal maniac in The Shining.  One could say that we all have a fear of losing control of our own minds and intentions.  Moreover, some might say that the control we assume we hold is incredibly fragile and illusionary.  Who among us has not had a dark thought after getting cut off in traffic or during the course of working for a brutish boss?  For most of us those types of thoughts are fleeting and provide a momentary sense of satisfaction.  It is difficult for us to imagine ourselves capable of serious cruelty as a result of the loosening of our psychological health; or perhaps not difficult so much as frightening.  The Shining shows us a man whose psychological well-being becomes shaken by circumstances and a boy whose ability to be in touch with things outside of his own consciousness is both terrifying and life-saving.

The visual landscape created by Stanley Kubrick for King’s terrifying tale, The Shining, evokes dream-imagery: the impossible scenes of Jack meeting party attendees dressed in 1920’s garb, Danny’s visions of a wave of blood in the hallway and of nearly identical girls asking to be his playmate, and the general peculiarity of a family taking care of a massive hotel for months at a time.  It sounds like a dream you’d recount to a friend, “I had this crazy dream last night that I had a job taking care of a massive hotel for the entire winter season and my family came with me.”  Psychologists would argue that images in dreams represent ideas, fantasies, and conflicts within our subconscious.  These dreams are potentially rich material for helping people develop a deeper relationship with their innermost selves.  Or as Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytical Psychology) put it, “…dreams are nothing less than self-representations of the psychic life-process.”  He also described dreaming as “a strange and disconcerting product distinguished by many “bad qualities,” such as lack of logic, questionable morality, uncouth form, and apparent absurdity or nonsense.”  Jung further wrote that images of a “cosmic element” are a sure sign of the collective, specifically dreams where one is “dead, in a strange place, is a stranger to himself, confused, mad, etc.”  Terms that certainly describe The Shining.

The nuclear family in the film, Jack, Wendy and Danny, represent different levels of awareness of the psychic powers of the universe and more specifically of the hotel itself.  Carl Jung posited that we have both a personal and a collective unconscious to contend with.  He wrote, “…the unconscious contains not only personal, but also impersonal collective components in the form of inherited categories or archetypes.”  Personal unconscious is something that is stitched together throughout our lifetime and contains our personal dreams, desires, fantasies, experiences, etc.  It develops as we do.  Archetypes are representative of the structure of the collective unconscious and much of human behavior is governed by them.  A strong and obvious example is the mother archetype that represents our need for nurturance and caretaking.  This collective unconscious predates us as individuals.  It’s history is vast yet immeasurable.

A common representation of archetypes in film and literature contains images of the hero archetype and also frequently the shadow.  The hero is self-explanatory; a character that triumphs, saves the day, accomplishes magnificent feats.  The shadow a little less obvious.  Each of us has a self that is striving to realize its individual destiny.  The shadow is the flip side of the self.  It is the dark, amoral component that could be said to be left over from more primitive animalistic days.  Perhaps one of it’s purposes is to aid us in surviving at whatever cost.  We can see the hero in both Wendy and Danny and the shadow self fully realized in Jack.

Jung wrote, “Once the personal repressions are lifted, the individual and the collective psyche begin to emerge in a coalescent state, thus releasing the hitherto repressed personal fantasies.”  We all have the potential to be in touch with this collective unconscious state, but it emerges most frequently with some catalyst such as through examination of dreams or experience of great personal turmoil.  It seems that Danny has long had psychic ability that he has coped with by inventing imaginary friend Tony.  Jack develops a psychic relationship with the hotel as it gradually seeps into his psyche.  He is not able, as Danny is, to view the odd occurrences and ghosts as “pictures in a book,” the way Danny tells himself Mr. Hallorann advised.  These ghosts and images, thus become real to Jack.  They are initially friendly: Lloyd pours Jack a bourbon and Grady helps clean off Jack’s jacket.  Wendy has the strongest psychological wall since she begins to merge with the hotel only after experiencing tremendous fear: she then sees the Colorado Room full of skeletons and watches a river of blood cascade through the hall.

As the collective unconscious increases in power, the conscious mind decreases in control.   If the conscious mind can digest and assimilate this new collective unconscious information, the individual will move towards psychological growth, if the conscious mind is not strong enough to handle the new information a psychotic reaction can occur. We see Jack’s psychological condition loosen and be taken over by the archetypes still lingering in the Overlook Hotel.  He contends with, not only his own shadow archetype but also the shadow archetype of Grady.  The interaction between Grady and Jack in the men’s room further underscores this dive into the collective unconscious.  Grady assures Jack, “You’ve always been the caretaker.  I should know, sir.  I’ve always been here.”  Even before that, we get a glimpse of this timeless relationship between Jack and the hotel when he is describing the feelings he had at the time of his interview: “When I came up here for my interview it was as though I’d been here before.  We all have moments of déjà vu but this was ridiculous.  It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.”

In this film, as many of us may fear in life, the shadow self overtakes Jack and he is left frozen and alone in the end.  We are led to believe he rejoins the 1920’s crowd forever celebrating, forever trapped inside the hotel.  Carl Jung believed we could transcend our shadow selves, our amoral impulses, through understanding, patience and practice.  Or, possibly, we can get stuck in an archetype, forever repeating the storyline.  For Jack that means becoming his shadow self, forever living on in the lore of the Overlook Hotel. ✪

Danielle Cole is a Philadelphia-based occasional philosopher who practices psychotherapy in the suburbs. She loves films of all kinds, especially those with protracted scenes of everyday life and any art that has a personal vision.