The Child and the Shadow

Draws on Jungian psychology to explore how creativity depends on confronting and integrating the "shadow," the parts of ourselves we reject. Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that imagination expands when we stop dividing ourselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts.

The essay begins with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of a man whose shadow leaves him, and builds into a defense of fantasy as the language of the inner self. First given as a lecture in 1974 and published in 1975.

Collected in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979).

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American writer whose Earthsea cycle and The Left Hand of Darkness rebuilt fantasy and science fiction as serious literature. Her essays did the same for the criticism of both.