Everyone knows about Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie and mystical short story tales that portray the essence of psychological complexities and reflected Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis. Although the majority of Poe’s narratives coincide with the decaying mental state, such psychological themes reached its turning-point with Poe’s “The Black Cat”, published in 1845. In summary, “The Black Cat” is a story about a caring, respectful, and friendly narrator who suffered from the influence of alcohol that causes him to progress into a violent and abusive individual. Throughout the story, the narrator continues to mistreat his wife and most of his pets, except for a black cat named Pluto. One day when the narrator longed for Pluto’s attentiveness, the cat rejected him, and this triggered a sense of extreme unpleasantness that made the narrator act violently towards his cat, causing him to pull out one of the cat’s eyes. To further elucidate Poe’s representation of the human mind and its complexities, we need to turn our attention to Philosopher Carl Jung’s conceptualized idea of the shadow. Carl Jung is a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology in 1912. Jung’s fascination with the unconsciousness gave him the leverage he needs to study Sigmund Freud’s theories of hysteria, which then led to his development of The Shadow, the pure evil we all have deep within ourselves. According to Jung, “…everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the denser and darker it gets” (Psychology and Religion, 1938). To further explain what this shadow is and where it’s located, let’s focus our attention on this image below:

Jung believed that every single one of us is wearing an untainted and white-colored mask, and this is what he referred to as the “persona”. Because of societal rules and expectations, each one of us puts on this mask to avoid being shunned and judged by society. This mask symbolizes our conformity to society. After this mask, we have our consciousness, where all the thoughts and ideas we have in real-time resides. The consciousness will most likely be very active when the persona is lifted, and this is when we’re in our own private place where we feel secure. However, deep inside our consciousness comes the “shadow”. This is our deepest and darkest satisfaction that most of us aren’t even aware of, and the more we repress these longings, the more it becomes sinister. From time to time, Jung believed our shadow will become apparent to us, giving us thoughts and ideas that create pleasure and fulfillment within ourselves, but we quickly repress it as such acts go against our moral compass and obediency to society. Knowing this, let’s try to bring it back to Poe’s use of writing techniques to show this central theme to his readers. The narrator was described as a people’s pleasure, giving him quality traits; such as, “tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions” (paragraph 2). This was evident throughout most of his childhood and teenage years, but that sense of conduct was indeed a ravenous attribute to go against these expectations. And this was the most apparent when the narrator, “came as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit, philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart…” (paragraph 9). The eagerness to neglect obedience and discipline with the sole purpose of killing the cat was in fact the resurfacing of a dense and dark shadow within his subconscious mind.

We are all prone to these transitions since our established morality in society has been less individualistic and more so on society’s definition of what’s good and what’s bad. But for an existentialist and philosophical mindset, we should embrace the shadow within ourselves and stop repressing it. That way, we can finally be harmonized with our impulsiveness and social expectancies.

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