Shadow and Persona Archetype. In Tim Kring’ s ‘Heroes’ film series, we try to understand the twin relationship between Nicky and Jesika. Nicky is a emotional and sweet mother who is trying to protect her child’s life. Jesika is the ghost of Nicky’s twin sister who died many years ago and still is present in her life. Sometimes Jesika’ s attempt is to protect Nicky’s life and sometimes she tries to manipulate her for bad reasons. There are scenes where Nicky sees her mirror image and do not recognizes it as hers. She sees Jesika’ s face to do horrible things. I could say that Jesika is a serial killer and paranoiac person. It is easier to both comprehend the two characters by Jung’s theory of Shadow and Persona personality. The Shadow is a concept that acknowledges all the hidden, repressed or abolished parts of each of our personalities. According to Jung, Shadow is ”the thing that a person do not wish to be” (Jung, 1959). It encloses behaviors that we find unpleasant or we tend to hide. Shadow is whatever is opposite to the ego and can be oppressed to the point that the person is not able to recognize it as his or hers (Klein, 1952). The Shadow contains primal drives and uncompleted potentials. It is controversial to understand that the Shadow may include repressed leadership skills or difficulties to connect with other people. As an abused child, Jesika never expressed her anger or aggressiveness to her close environment. At this moment, the ghost is represented by having the leadership and causes all the pain she have felt during her brief life. She causes a great number of murders and she does this without any compassion. Her difficulty to get involved is obvious. The Shadow controls Jesika’ s morality, power and creativity and her behavior is a diverse of uncompleted developed functions that she conglomerated through life (Jung, 1971). From the other point of view, Nicky holds the public face of the individual, which according to Jung’ s theory, is called the Persona. Persona/ Nicky constitutes a complicated system of relations between self consciousness and the societal rules. Nicky’ s character is designed to impress and to incorporate the societal demands (Fawkes, 2014 pp. 4). Persona should not be presented as a nasty aspect of the psyche. It is substantial to the obtainment of social skills and status. For Stein (1998) Persona is a ‘competent’ ego that counterpoises a path between social expectations- Nicky to be a caregiver to her child and express compassion for its needs- and inner needs- to confront the difficult circumstances, to cause pain to people that try to hurt them or set them apart, to find an immoral way to bring money for the family. Persona and Shadow could be represented as twins. The first constitutes the conscious and acceptable issues of personality and the later is the place where all that is feared or despised are hidden or repressed (Corlett & Pearson, 2003). Even though the film director prompts us to believe that Jesika and Nicky is one and the same person that suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, Nicky will always be the conscious sick one part of the self, while Jesika will be the unconscious and primal part of her which is repressed and tries to be revealed in order to gain the control. It is important to understand, that an issue on Shadow thinking is the idea that the person do not recognizes its shadow and believes that it is something strange and not her own.

avc Parallel Complementary Archetype from Vaya Kapousidou on Vimeo.