Most of us are initiated into life through a carefully curated moral landscape. In childhood, parents, teachers and other institutions teach us to distinguish right from wrong. “Obey your parents.” “Be polite.” “Follow the rules.” These statements shape who we are and how we perceive the world. They communicate that the world is orderly, legible, and safe—provided one behaves correctly.
This is the bright world.
It is not merely a set of values but a mood: predictable, structured, and innocent. In it, authority is benevolent and justified. The home functions as a moral and physical shelter, insulating the child from the dangers of the outside. The bright world of early childhood is a world already interpreted for you.
As children grow, cracks begin to appear. They encounter influences beyond the “good institutions” of family and school: peers, friends, media, sexuality, strangers. They discover that there are ways of living and valuing that do not fit the moral grammar they were taught. There’s more out there than the secure order of the household: cruelty, desire, power, aggression, transgression, violence, and pleasure.
This is the dark world.
Not just plain evil, but unprotected. Ambiguous. Charged with desire and danger. It is the domain where rules are non-existent and authority is turned on its head.
These two worlds are modes of existence. They represent moods and dimensions of human life that coexist, overlap, and conflict. While the bright world promises meaning through obedience, the dark world breaks the coherent perspective of the workings of the world and introduces a need to make sense of the new world.
This is why puberty so often feels traumatic. The adolescent still inhabits the bright world ideologically; treated as a child, spoken to with a discourse that can’t hold its own weight. But their body and emotions get closer and closer to an adult’s. Desire erupts without a vocabulary. Shame, curiosity, and rebellion appear simultaneously. The bright world’s categories can no longer account for lived experience, but they can't understand the dark world either. This disoriented stage is what we commonly know as teen angst.
At this point, identification with parents becomes strained. What once felt natural begins to feel imposed. The adolescent starts to question inherited values, sometimes clumsily, sometimes aggressively. From the parents’ perspective, this looks like betrayal: behavior that “does not follow the upbringing.” From the child’s perspective, it is necessity. One cannot become oneself without loosening the grip of the world one was handed.
Who's got something really dirty? I wanna prove myself as an adult
Name Brand by Remo Drive
During this rupture that begins in adolescence and can last for decades—or even an entire lifetime—the values that come into conflict are not society’s values in general, but the family’s particular moral world. Although these values are embedded in, and often overlap with, broader social norms, it is important to distinguish between the two. For example, even in societies that have become increasingly accepting of non-traditional sexual orientations, “coming out of the closet” often remains a delicate and emotionally charged moment precisely because it confronts *family* values rather than abstract social attitudes. While there may also be tension with non-accepting sectors of society, the decisive conflict is frequently intimate rather than public: it is the risk of breaking with the moral universe in which one was raised.
The contrast between the two worlds is most clearly articulated in the novel Demian, where Hermann Hesse describes existence as divided between a luminous, moralized world of order and a darker world of instinct, ambiguity, and self-creation. The tragedy of modern life, for Hesse, is not that the dark world exists, but that we are taught to repress it and to pretend that maturity consists in remaining loyal to the bright world alone.
In philosophy and psychoanalysis, this tension appears in multiple forms. In Carl Jung, it takes the form of the persona and the shadow: the socially acceptable mask versus the disowned and repressed aspects of the self. The bright world corresponds to the persona—what is rewarded, named, and praised—while the dark world contains what does not fit in that conception. Parents play a decisive role in shaping the boundaries of praise and repression. Individuation, then, involves loosening the grip of inherited value systems, creating new ones, and integrating both sides of the psyche.
In Friedrich Nietzsche, the same split appears as the Apollonian and the Dionysian: order, clarity, and reason versus chaos, excess, intoxication, and creative destruction. Civilization privileges the Apollonian, but life itself pulses with Dionysian energy. None of them in isolation is able to exhaust the human condition completely. You need both.
For psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the child’s self precedes its very existence. Long before the child speaks or chooses, and even before they’re born, they are spoken about. They are embedded in parental expectations, fantasies, and values (what Lacan calls the symbolic order). The bright world precedes the subject. It is not discovered; it is imposed. The dark world emerges when the subject encounters what escapes this symbolic net: desire, lack, contradiction.