The shadow represents the repressed , suppressed and disowned aspects of the psyche which are not in the conscious awareness of people but which influences their personality and day to day interactions in profound and significant ways
Just to cite an example If a person angry at someone but it is unacceptable to his superego to accept that anger because the superego tells him that he is a good person and good people don't get angry then that anger will be suppressed and after sometime the person will consciously lose contact with it but suppressing and repressing it doesn't heal it or make it go away so it will keep lingering in the back of his mind and it will look for a person as a hook on whom it can be projected and suddenly the world appears full of angry people to the person who has suppressed it and he feels that he have never been angry in his life with anyone so why is everyone mad at him and he becomes sad.
The original thought or impulse
" I am mad at the world " becomes " the world is making me sad " because of projection of suppressed anger
Now let's talk about gossiping ,
Gossiping is basically projection by a group of people of their own unacceptable and disowned qualities on the object of the gossip . Though it appears to be a mild benign socially accepted thing which everyone engages in ,repeated gossiping causes fragmentation of the psyche as it causes constant projection of the disowned qualities and leaves the person with a narrow range of qualities and attributes which we call the persona
Now most of the people don't know that Freud never used the term Id or ego in his writings , he referred to ego as "I" and the Id as the "IT" in German but to sound more scientific Freud's English translator James Strachey translated the I as the Ego and the IT as the Id
Whereas what Freud actually meant by the I was 1 st person attributes which a person is consciously aware of in himself and the IT as his own 1 st person attributes which are repressed and projected on others and seen as 3 Rd person attributes
And according to Freud true healing occurs when I becomes the It that is the person accepts the projected 3 rd person attributes in others as his own attributes
Autobiographical gossiping in contrast is a process where the disowned and projected aspects of the self are renowned back by gossiping about yourself with yourself
So in autobiographical gossiping he 3 Rd person attributes are fl converted to 1 st person attributes by gossiping about yourself
This process of autobiographical gossiping involves a 3 step process
called the 3-2- 1 process
1. 1 step is talking about the quality which a persona hates in another person in 3 Rd person
For example - He is always angry , He is so rude
2. 2 nd step involves imagining taking with the person face to face about why is he behaving in such a way, so in this step the 3 Rd person attribute is converted to a 2 nd person attribute
For example - Why are you so rude , Why are you always angry ?
3. 3rd step - The 3rd step involves converting the 2 nd person attribute into a 1 st person attribute that is the person should accept the quality or attribute which he hates in the other person as his own attribute
For example the person should say i am angry , i am rude
Though on a superficial level it appears that the person is having a negative self talk where he is being demeaning and condescending to himself but actually he is reowning the parts of himself which have been forgotten and which are subconsciously sabotaging his life and influencing his behaviour
In this day and age there is a lot of talk about positive thinking and being positive , but what it does is that it only reinforces positive aspects of the persona while disowning the negative aspects and pushing them in the depths of the unconscious where they become the shadow material