Ken Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness model comprises the following four levels: shadow, ego, existential, and mind. To come right to the point, the second force (psychoanalysis and post Freudian) is situated on the ego and shadow level. The first, Wilber (1975) explains that human beings tend to identify with his or her ego. While human beings in the existential level are regarded as organism which has a rational thought, human beings in the ego level are deemed to have a mental picture of his or her total psychophysical organism. The second, Wilber (1975) describes the shadow level in the following: “Under certain circumstances, man can alienate various aspects of his own psyche, dis-identify with them, and thus narrow his sphere of identity to only parts of the ego, which we may refer to as the persona” (p. 110). As mentioned above, human beings in the ego level are likely to identify with his or her whole ego. On the other hand, human beings in the shadow level become gradually able to dis-identify with some aspects in his or her ego.
As well as Wilber’s remarks, psychoanalysis addresses human ego and shadow realm. In psychoanalysis, human ego is defined as “the part of the psyche in contact with external reality” (Frager & Fadiman, 2002, p. 24), and human shadow is described as “an archetypal form that serves as the focus for material that has been repressed from consciousness” (p. 69). I think that the second force is categorized into the ego and shadow level in Wilber’s model in that both of them refer to the same aspects of human beings such as ego and shadow.
Reference
