Writing the Shadow: Persona, Repression, and Individuation in Kamala Das’s My Story

Author(s)	Ms Sonali Raina, Dr Pardeep Kumar
Country	India
Abstract	Kamala Das’s My Story presents autobiographical writing as a sustained confrontation between socially constructed identity and the less acceptable dimensions of the self. This paper examines the narrative through Carl Gustav Jung’s concepts of persona, shadow, and individuation, arguing that Das’s autobiographical practice transforms writing into a mode of psychological self-recognition. The persona imposed upon the female subject through family, marriage, sexuality, and social convention repeatedly conflicts with desires, anger, vulnerability, and creative impulses that remain difficult to accommodate within conventional femininity. These disowned elements constitute a shadow that emerges through bodily experience, emotional crisis, erotic relationships, and literary expression. The narrative, however, does not present individuation as a completed achievement. Rather, My Story records an uneven movement toward greater consciousness in which writing becomes a means of negotiating contradictory psychic positions. The study therefore reads autobiography as a textual space in which the divided self progressively encounters and reconfigures its own unconscious contents.
Keywords	Individuation, persona, repression, self-recognition, shadow
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-26

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