One of the reasons why the press has had such a field day with Tony Blair following the publication of the Chilcot report, is that we love to find fault with people, especially if they are wealthy and famous and have committed some indiscretion. And Blair, who took our country into an illegal war that should never have been fought, features on all three counts. He exaggerated the threat of the WMDs, he went to war even though peaceful options had not been exhausted, and he made no preparations for peace. He tried too hard to please the Americans.

He sent men and women into battle ill-equipped. Nearly 250,000 Iraqis got killed and ISIS emerged out of the disbanding of the Iraqi army. Blair also refused to heed the greatest anti-war march our country has ever seen, and as is now well-known, the war was engaged in solely for geopolitical reasons and of course, for Iraq’s oil. If you read Naomi Klein’s extraordinary book The Shock Doctrine, you will see that the real aim was to pummel Iraq to smithereens – to shock the country so badly so that there would be no resistance to the large corporate interests in America taking over.

So of course Blair has a huge amount to answer for. However, this does not explain why he is being so demonised, on top of, a few months ago, also getting pummelled for possessing a multi-million pound real estate portfolio? Why is he so, so reviled?

The main reason is that we really love to have someone to hate, as it makes us feel so much better about ourselves. Our tendency to demonise used to be focused on Saddam Hussein, then it shifted to Osama bin Laden, then the late Jimmy Saville took over the mantle and now it’s old Blair. And it works like this. We all have a dark side, a dimension to us that we don’t know about and don’t like to see and which Carl Jung called “our Shadow”, and it is the opposite to what we primarily identify with about ourselves. In other words, if you and I like to believe we are only generous and selfless, then we’ll probably have a dark, Shadow side to us that is also mean and selfish which we will probably refuse to accept about ourselves.

Thus, in order to stay in the dark about this aspect of ourselves, we look around for people to use as objects onto whom we can project it onto, for then we don’t have to look at what is unpleasant to face inside ourselves. So in Blair’s case, if we don’t want to own the fact that we may be materialistic or greedy (perhaps we think we are only “spiritual” and generous!) then he is a jolly good hook to dump our “stuff” onto! He’s also a great hook for our greed, for our inauthenticity (“Teflon Tony”), our tendency to be fawning (his relationship with Bush), our abuse of power and our grandiosity. And if we can make Blair into the baddie, then it follows that we become the goodie. In other words, when we project what we don’t want to look at in ourselves, onto another – in this case, onto Blair – we can feel purified and self-righteous.

Indeed, I think that Blair probably felt the same vis-a-vis Saddam Hussein who carried his shadow. I think he saw his own dark side in the power-hungry and ruthless dictator and unaware of this, felt that he would be feted as a world saviour if he were only to rid the world of this tyrant. Actually, by waging war against Saddam, he was simply trying to rid himself of his own inner tyrant!

Certainly, I admit that I initially took part in the demonising of Blair. However, if I look closely at myself, I also ask myself how I would have operated if I were in his shoes, and my answer is that if I had no self-knowledge of the inner demons driving me – which Blair obviously didn’t – I might well have made some of his mistakes, for power, we remember, is incredibly corrupting and great power even more so!

Put simply, is there some aspect of a Blair inside me? The answer is yes and I want to start owning this instead of continuing to project what I refuse to look at in myself, onto him. I choose to stop saying “Oh that dreadful Blair and by default, that wonderfully virtuous me!” I wish to do this because I know that the more I can be aware of my own dark side, the more I can work to transform it and in the process become more whole as a person. Blair’s presence helps me do this.

The point I want to make, then, is that those people who reflect aspects of our own dark sides, give us a gift in that they ask us to view the mote in our own eye and so help us stop playing the game of being a pot calling the kettle black. When as a psychotherapist, I work with people to help them become more aware of their Shadow side (repressing it takes up a lot of energy and in extreme cases, can lead to a very delusory self-image) I often ask them to think of someone of their own sex with whom they have a big charge with and see what that charge really is, and then to look back at themselves and ask themselves if what they have been making that person carry, is something that they are denying or don’t want to own. It mostly is.

My point is simply that if we can see what our shadow sides are, then we can do something about them – we can work at integrating them. If we don’t, then we let them control us as was the case with Blair. In other words, had he seen where he was inflated, greedy, distorted by power, narcissistic and messianic, and, deep down, felt impoverished (he had a difficult childhood and was very poor), we would not be in the state we are in today. A hundred and ninety-seven servicemen and women would still be alive and we would not, as a nation, have so disgraced ourselves on the world stage.

What Liberates?

The Oxford Dictionary defines liberation as: ‘the act of setting someone free from slavery, imprisonment or oppression’. Liberation, therefore, has both inner and outer dimensions which are intrinsically inter-related because if we are not free inside ourselves, it will inevitably limit our ability to live a liberated outer life, even if the society we live in is a relatively free one. The same can hold true the other way around as well. Many of us, therefore, need liberating not only…