Marie Louise von Franz says somewhere that a human being who has done work with the shadow or absorbed the shadow gives a sense of being condensed. Other people willingly give him or her some authority in moral matters. If a teacher has worked with his own shadow, she says that students, no matter how young they are, sense it, and discipline in that room will not be difficult, because the students know that the teacher has his crow with him. Other teachers, she says, who have not worked with their shadow, can talk about discipline all day and never get it. I like the idea that the work a person does on his or her shadow results in a condensation, a thickening or a densening, of the psyche which is immediately apparent, and which results in a feeling of natural authority without the authority being demanded.
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Another quality that comes in when a person absorbs his shadow is in certain kinds of humor. Lincoln had it. Someone asked Lincoln if he would find him a good government job, and Lincoln said, "I have very little influence in this administration." When a woman he met on a train told him he was one of the ugliest men she'd seen in her entire life, he didn't become offended. "What should I do about that?" he asked the woman. "Well," she said, "you could stay home." Lincoln told that story on himself—he liked her answer.