The Archetypal Enemy by Peter Shepherd Based as it was on an Old Testament morality, the Christian injunction to 'love one another' came to be linked with the imperative to repress those qualities in our nature that were thought to oppose spiritual love - sex and aggression. The historic split between Good and Evil became incarnated in the divided Self, the repression of the 'bad' inside us, the Shadow. We are programmed to distinguish between right and wrong, an enemy from friend and the strange from familiar. All human communities display an impressive agreement on the kinds of behaviour to be included in each category. The incest taboo, for example, is apparently a universal phenomenon in human communities, as are ideas that there is a fundamental distinction between murder and killing in warfare, that parents are obligated to their children, that it is wrong to seize your neighbour's property or his wife, and so on.
Guilt acts as a powerful inducement to the maintenance of social cohesion.
Moreover, placing moral prohibitions in the realm of the sacred, sanctified by religion, established their absolute authority and heightened the sense of remorse experienced by sinners so misguided as to break them. As a defence against the catastrophe of abandonment, the super-ego is established as the inner watchdog whose function is to monitor our behaviour so as to ensure relative conformity to the values of the culture into which we happen to have been born. However, by closing off the link to the Self, the opposite qualities of kindness, decency and compassion, also native to the Self, may not be actualised. Fear of the shadow of the Self becomes identified with fear of the Self. There appears to be an archetypal instruction 'to learn the rules'.