Jung wrote something very close to this: a sentence documented in The Practice of Psychotherapy (Collected Works vol. 16, p. 59) reads “How can I be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole.” The popular one-liner is that sentence trimmed and lightly reordered — and we could not confirm the circulating wording against a primary text. Wikiquote lists the short form under “Attributed,” with no citation ↗.
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole” Carl Jung (1875–1961) — attributed. The popular line "I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole" is a trimmed, reordered form of a documented sentence in Jung's Collected Works vol. 16, "Problems of Modern Psychotherapy," p. 59: "How can I be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole." The short form itself is unsourced; Wikiquote lists it under "Attributed." Traced by Quotle.info, 22 July 2026.
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Provenance
Where the real sentence lives
Essay
Problems of Modern Psychotherapy
Collected in
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 53–75
Passage
p. 59
Translation
Earlier English rendering by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Kegan Paul, 1933), pp. 34–36
How can I be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole…
two translations
The 1933 Dell & Baynes translation of the same passage instead reads “How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow?”
Wikiquote ↗ places the popular short form in its “Attributed” list — no work, no page, no date. That is the honest starting point: the line as shared is unsourced.
The same essay had appeared in English three decades earlier in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) ↗, translated by Cary F. Baynes with W. S. Dell — which is why two English wordings compete online.
Both documented English sources are modern and protected: Modern Man in Search of a Soul was first published in 1933 and the Collected Works vol. 16 translation in 1966, so neither is in the US public domain. The circulating short form cannot be tied to any pre-1931 publication, so treat this line as in-copyright and quote it briefly with attribution.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
Right author, rewritten sentence
Nobody else is claiming this line — the problem is not who but what. The wording that spread is not the wording either English translation of Jung actually prints.
✓The idea is authentically Jung’s and a nearly identical sentence is documented in “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” CW 16 ↗ — but the exact line you have seen shared is a paraphrase of it, not a quotation from it.
Context
Why the missing half matters
The line people share is only the second half of a two-part thought. In the documented passage Jung first asks a question — how can a person be substantial, have weight and reality, without casting a shadow? — and only then draws the conclusion about needing a dark side. Detached from the question, the sentence reads like a licence for one’s worst impulses. In place, it is an argument about honesty: what is inferior in you is still yours, and pretending otherwise makes you less real, not more.
The passage sits in an essay on the practice of psychotherapy, not in a book of aphorisms. Jung is describing what happens in the consulting room when a patient stops performing virtue — and the sentence that follows the famous one, in the Collected Works wording, is about recognising that you are a human being like any other.
How can I be substantial without casting a shadow?
Read the full story
Two English wordings are in circulation because two translations exist. The version in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, runs “How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow?” The later Collected Works text uses “How can I be substantial without casting a shadow?” Neither matches the internet’s short form, which is why quote sites carry it uncited.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1875–1961 · Swiss psychiatrist & founder of analytical psychology
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology, breaking with Freud in the 1910s to pursue his own account of the unconscious. He gave psychology the vocabulary of the shadow, the anima, introversion and extraversion, and the collective unconscious. His writings on the shadow — the disowned part of the self — are the reason lines like this one circulate under his name, sometimes accurately and sometimes not.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Collected Works, vol. 16
C. G. Jung, “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 53–75; the passage at p. 59. The essay’s earlier English rendering by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes appears in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Kegan Paul, 1933), pp. 34–36. The exact popular wording — “I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole” — is not confirmed in either.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-must-also-have-a-dark-side-if-i-am-to-be-whole/