Shadow, Self, and Regulation
How Carl Jung Expands Our Understanding of Emotional Intelligence
What if emotional intelligence is not just a set of skills, but a lifelong psychological process?
In our cultural conversations about emotional intelligence, the focus often stays on behavior: how well we manage stress, express empathy, navigate conflict, and regulate emotions. These are important competencies—but they tell only part of the story. In my latest academic paper, Shadow, Self, and Regulation: A Jungian Contribution to Emotional Intelligence Theory, I explore what happens when we go deeper.
Drawing from Carl Jung’s seminal work on the shadow, the persona, and the Self, this paper reframes emotional intelligence as more than social fluency or emotional control. Instead, it presents EI as a process of psychological integration—a path toward inner coherence, symbolic understanding, and emotional maturity.
Jungian psychology brings something to the emotional intelligence conversation that’s often missing: a recognition of the unconscious forces that shape our emotional lives. Emotional repression, projection, and fragmentation cannot be resolved with skills training alone. They require something deeper: honest shadow work, confrontation with internal contradictions, and the development of a Self that can hold complexity.
In the paper, I map Jung’s core concepts to the major domains of emotional intelligence and examine how this integrated model applies to three key fields:
Clinical practice, where emotional issues are often rooted in disowned or unconscious material
Education, where emotional literacy needs to move beyond naming feelings to making meaning of them
Leadership, where authenticity and humility matter as much as performance and influence
This work challenges us to think beyond surface-level regulation and toward depth-level integration. If emotional intelligence is truly about wholeness, then we must consider what Jung called individuation: the gradual unfolding of the authentic self through emotional insight, not just control.