In her critical essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” Ursula K. LeGuin employs archetypal language and Jungian psychology to demonstrate how children are taught deeper meanings of life through the genre of fantasy. This discussion of hers continues in another of her essays, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” which describes how the best qualities of humans exist in children, but are often repressed and denied into adulthood. LeGuin argues that if the imagination is encouraged during a person’s childhood, then the person will act wisely as an adult, but if the imagination is ignored, their mind will be restricted through adulthood. Throughout “The Child and the Shadow,” she uses the psychologist Carl Jung’s ideas that a person’s unconscious mind is a source of creativity and imagination instead of only a place for desires to be restrained.
Another important part of LeGuin’s argument comes from Jung’s concept of archetypes: recurring images, symbols, and situations found to have universal meanings across cultures by way of society’s collective unconscious mind. One of these archetypes is the psyche element of the shadow, which encompasses a person’s repressed thoughts, feelings, and impulses. According to both Jung and LeGuin, a person must be aware of their shadow, and come to terms with it in order to reach their full potential. In “The Child and the Shadow,” LeGuin shows that the genre of fantasy is the best way to approach such archetypes for children.
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