Love, in short, is part of the dialectic of life and to be true to love, we must explore the whole of it, including manifestations of its opposite.

It has been observed that we are often most able to recognize love by its very absence, just as we are able to recognize freedom by its opposite: domination, oppression, aggression, murder, war and slavery. In telling the story of love it is useful – in fact, necessary – to look at manifestations of the absence and the opposite of love.

We refer to neediness, jealousy, anger, hate, loneliness, boredom, carelessness, delinquency, anxiety, spite, disappointment, rivalry, domination, criminality, apathy, atheism, emotional death.

For Jungian analyst and author James Hillman Ph.D. , the antidote to the shadow and specifically to war is where society places it priorities. He says, “If every young man, let’s just take the United States, every young man had intense aesthetic life, day in and day out in his teens, with his guitar, with his moviemaking, with his poetry writing, with his fashion design; anything he liked to do, including sports, he would be not drawn to the military in the same way. Very few would be. They volunteer for the military for that aesthetic intense experience, which is deprived in our culture.”

To better understand love’s shadow, Rabbi Alan Lew looks at himself. He says, “I work for peace on the large scale all the time. But I think I understand most deeply that if I don’t conquer my own inner inclination to project my own darkness onto other people; if I don’t get in the habit of acknowledging my own inner darkness, of seeing it, before I begin to do this unconscious projection onto others; that there’s never going be peace in the world. The conflict that rages in the world is one million times the conflicts that are raging in the human breast. I know that we can learn to acknowledge our darkness in the moment before we project it onto others. But it’s a tremendous leap of human consciousness.”