On 14 June 1966, with quiet bureaucratic sobriety, the Holy See published the Notification by which the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was abolished. Four and a half centuries of institutionalised censorship closed in half a page. The Index had been established by Paul IV in 1559 with totalising ambitions: to contain the Lutheran drift, to curb free thought, to protect — so it was said — the faithful from the contagion of dangerous ideas. Among the books initially prohibited were Boccaccio’s Decameron, Dante’s De Monarchia, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.^¹ Over the following centuries, Galileo, Kant, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Foscolo, D’Annunzio, Moravia, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir would be added. The catalogue of European excellence, in short.

What was truly being attempted, by banning Boccaccio? The question is not rhetorical. Boccaccio did not preach nihilism, did not subvert the social order, did not incite violence. He told the stories of whole human beings: with their cunning, their desire, their cruelty and their grace. He staged, in other words, what every well-ordered society prefers not to see: human nature in its irreducible complexity. Censorship did not fear the text. It feared what the text might awaken in the reader.

II.

In Aion — the great work of 1951 dedicated to the phenomenology of the Self and to Christian symbolism — Jung formulates what he calls a "psychological rule":

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”^²

This is not a metaphor. For Jung it is an observable mechanism, as rigorously verifiable as the symptoms a clinician records in a neurosis. The psyche, individual or collective, cannot tolerate incompleteness. What is excluded from consciousness — repressed, denied, prohibited, burned — does not disappear. It migrates. It finds other channels. It returns as an external event, as social conflict, as persecution, as a culture war.

The structure that governs this movement is called the Shadow. A technical term in analytical psychology, but also an image of powerful immediacy: the Shadow is what the body cannot help but project when it stands in the light. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote in Psychology and Religion in 1938, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. […] But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”^³

The Shadow is not identical with Evil. This is one of the most common misunderstandings. The Shadow is the sum of what the Ego has refused to recognise as its own: sometimes for genuine moral reasons, more often out of social convenience, fear, or conformism. What is excluded may be dark — aggression, sexuality, ambition — but it may also be what is simply inconvenient, out of fashion, difficult to integrate into the image a community holds of itself. The literary classics — Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare — are, in this sense, professional custodians of the collective Shadow. They contain everything that subsequent ages have systematically tried to forget: the violence of power, desire that crosses categories, moral ambiguity as a structural condition of existence.

III.

Observing what is happening today in the Anglophone West — where the removal of literary texts from school curricula has become, in recent years, a quantifiable and documented phenomenon — the Jungian psychologist should not be surprised. He should, if anything, recognise the structure.

In December 2024, the largest examining body in Wales, the WJEC, announced a new literature programme for GCSEs — the end-of-secondary-school examinations — with effect from September 2025. The new syllabus excludes John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, two novels that for decades had represented the heart of Anglophone literary education. The stated reason: the presence of racial slurs in the texts would be “psychologically and emotionally harmful” to Black students.^⁴ The Commissioner for Children in Wales, Rocio Cifuentes, declared that it was not a matter of censorship, but of safeguarding the wellbeing of children who had reported the distress they experienced during those classroom discussions. It is not censorship. This sentence deserves attention, because it is structurally identical to the one with which every act of censorship, throughout history, has always described itself.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum did not present itself as censorship, but as spiritual prophylaxis. The Roman damnatio memoriae was not an act of vengeance, but of public hygiene. The book burnings of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes were, for those who carried them out, sanitary measures against pathological thought.

No different, in its psychological structure, is the other side of the phenomenon. In the United States, the so-called book ban wave has tripled the number of texts removed from school libraries between 2022 and 2024, with pressure coming predominantly from conservative coalitions demanding the exclusion of books dealing with sexuality, gender identity, and race.^⁵ In the State of Texas, a 2024 law — Senate Bill 13 — required school libraries to remove materials with “indecent” content. The practical result: in a single school district, New Braunfels, over 1,500 titles were removed or restricted, including works by Melville, Austen, Hugo, Shakespeare, Homer, and Ayn Rand.^⁶

Two opposing movements, two opposing discourses, two opposing vocabularies. But the psychological structure is identical: both attempt to protect a collective consciousness from contact with what that consciousness cannot, or will not, integrate. The progressive left removes books that show racism because racism must be invisible so as not to wound. The conservative right removes books that show homosexuality or sexual complexity because that complexity must be invisible so as not to contaminate. In both cases, the text is treated as a pathogen. In both cases, what is feared is not the text, but the inner movement the text might trigger in the reader.

IV.

There is a Jungian concept that illuminates this mechanism with clinical precision: projection. The Ego, individual or collective, cannot bear to recognise in itself what does not fit the image it holds of itself. It projects it outward, attributing it to an object, a group, a text. The text becomes the bearer of what the community cannot name to itself. And its elimination, far from being an act of hygiene, is the most psychologically dangerous act a culture can perform: isolating the repressed content from the possibility of being processed.

Jung describes this process with a formula worth quoting in full: “When the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” Replace “individual” with “community”, and the portrait of our cultural present is already complete. Left and right hurling mutual accusations of censorship, each convinced it is defending freedom while compressing it, each unable to recognise that its own moralising fury is exactly symmetrical to the one it condemns.

In Italy, too, in different forms, this mechanism makes itself visible. In March 2025, the Oriano Tassinari Clò library in Bologna found itself at the centre of a national controversy because an eleven-year-old student had borrowed Heartstopper, Alice Oseman’s graphic novel telling a love story between male adolescents. Members of the Lega called for the removal of “propagandistic books” from the children’s sections of public libraries. The Italian Library Association formally expressed solidarity with the librarians, denouncing “a signal of a climate that risks becoming hostile to freedom of information and its accessibility.”^⁷

The Italian case is structurally the inverse of the Welsh or Californian one, but psychologically identical. What varies is the content of the Shadow one wishes to render invisible: there, the historical racism of the classics; here, the variety of contemporary affective experience. What does not vary is the gesture: remove the book. Withdraw from collective consciousness the text that might initiate a difficult, disturbing, necessary inner movement.

V.

Here it is necessary to pause on what a book does, from the perspective of depth psychology. A quality literary text is not an ideological document: it is a space of encounter between the reader’s consciousness and contents that belong, in Jungian terminology, to the collective unconscious. Great literature is great precisely because it brings to the surface layers of human experience that daily life keeps compressed: death, desire, betrayal, guilt, grace. It offers — in a symbolic context, within a safe narrative enclosure — the possibility of meeting the Shadow without being overwhelmed by it.

This is why literary censorship is always, from a psychological point of view, an act of self-harm. It does not eliminate the Shadow: it deprives the community of the most refined instrument it possesses for integrating it. And the unintegrated Shadow, as Jung insisted, does not remain still. It accumulates. It grows in density and weight. Until it finds an outlet: the scapegoat, symbolic or real violence, polarisation, fanaticism.

Homer is not a manual of toxic masculinity, just as Boccaccio is not a manual of libertinism. They are texts that stage the totality of the human being, in its irreducible ambivalence. In the Iliad, Achilles is both the warrior and the weeping man; Hector is the father who cradles a son terrified by his own father’s helmet before going to his death. Priam crawling among the corpses to retrieve his son’s body is perhaps the highest scene ever written on the dignity of paternal love. Whoever has truly read the Iliad cannot have extracted from it a eulogy of violence: they will have gathered, if they read with attention, a lament on violence. A lament twenty-four books long.

VI.

In analytical psychology, the process that allows the Shadow to be integrated without being destroyed by it carries a precise name: individuation. It is not a painless process. It requires, as Jung wrote, “considerable moral effort.” It requires the willingness to look at what is uncomfortable, to recognise in the other what one fears in oneself, to tolerate ambivalence rather than resolving it artificially into one of two sides.

The great literary works are, in this sense, instruments of collective individuation. Not because they teach values — this is the most banal reduction of aesthetic experience — but because they open a space in which the reader’s consciousness can encounter what it normally excludes. The reader who finishes Macbeth has not emerged unscathed: he has traversed, in symbolic form, murderous ambition, remorse, dissolution. And he has emerged, if the text has worked, no longer ignorant of that part of himself.

When a culture removes these texts — from the right or from the left, in the name of purity or of wellbeing — it does not simplify its task. It makes it impossible. It surrenders the instrument. And the Shadow, left without form and without name, returns as fate: as conflict that “seems” to come from outside, as polarisation that intensifies without apparent reason, as symbolic violence that normalises itself until it no longer surprises anyone.

VII.

There is a passage in Jung that should serve as epigraph in every library and every ministerial committee concerned with school curricula. It is found in Psychology and Religion, and is dedicated to the collective Shadow: “Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”^³

The problem, of course, is that looking at one’s own Shadow is considerably less comfortable than burning someone else’s. The censorious impulse is the projective impulse in its most organised form: attributing to a text, an image, an idea, the responsibility for what belongs to one’s own unexamined psyche. The convenience is enormous. The psychological cost, equally enormous.

In the millennia the West has spent building its literary canon, something essential has accumulated in the texts: not values, not ideologies, not behavioural manuals. Psychic experience has accumulated. The experience of generations who sought to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being — as Jung wrote — finding in the great texts the form of that search. The great books are the repository of this light. They do not teach how one ought to be. They show how one has been, how one is, how one might be. In their totality, not in their redeemed portion.