Ambivalence is as inevitable in behavior as in belief. Every way of being and acting has antithetical alternatives, and to be conscious of one is to be conscious of the other. The inherent logic of English (and other Indo-European languages) promotes this by providing logical opposites: a word such as kind is meaningless without the antithetical concept, unkind. In order to think of himself [form a self-image] as kind, a person must be aware of what he would do if he were unkind. Indeed, he expresses his kindness as much by abstaining from cruel acts as by performing kind ones. He is necessarily aware of his capacity to be either kind or cruel, but he does not necessarily permit himself to be aware of his desire to be both.
--Snell and Gail Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)
The concept of the shadow, first termed by Jung but having its roots in several aspects of psychoanalytic theory from Freud et al., relies on the ambivalence described above. It is a complex topic, but basically: an impulse, desire, experience, etc. that is deemed undesirable or otherwise unacceptable is alienated or repressed, cut off from conscious awareness, but does not disappear--instead, it makes its presence known in various ways, most notably through the process of projection (which can be described as perceiving one's shadow in the mirrors, as it were, of other people).
Ambivalence lies at the heart of one's relationship with the shadow. It is aptly named--we can never escape our physical shadow, but we can ignore it and keep it from view.
In the field of ego psychology, it has been found that individuals who have confronted and integrated their shadow in a thorough manner emerge with a high "toleration for ambiguity" (to use Jane Loevinger's phrase). This ambiguity (or ambivalence) has been present since the early years of the person, but it can now be approached with a greater sensitivity to the interdependence and polarity (as Putney and Putney describe above) of all thoughts, actions, desires, etc. It requires a willingness to accept seemingly contradictory desires (e.g. the desire to be both kind and cruel, even to the same person), instead of ignoring or repressing one or the other, which was the way the ego dealt with such contradictions in the earlier stages of its development. This is another important aspect of the shadow: for the most part, everyone has some un-integrated shadow material because of the nature of ego development. As Freud pointed out, the ego begins its life in the early years of childhood as a weak and feeble entity, and thus does not have the strength and means to manage and organize all of the impulses and desires of the self (in his system, mainly deriving from the id), so it is forced to split off various aspects of the overall self in order to conduct its business with the outside world.
The superego also contributes to this splitting (note: in psychology, "splitting" has multiple meanings, so I am not using it here in any precise sense), by emphasizing certain desirable aspects of the personality, other aspects are deemed undesirable and are easy to ignore or dissociate from the overall personality. But the superego, as much as the young child would like to believe about its parents, is not the final authority, and its pronouncements are often too simplistic (e.g. "anger/aggression is bad") and can end up stifling the ego's development. So, the ego, once it has developed to a certain stage, can return to the projected, alienated, repressed aspects of the overall self, and confront the ambiguity and ambivalence that at first seemed so confusing, but turns out to be much closer to the nature of the world. Again, as I described here, a more accurate map is created for the territory.
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