Shadow work has moved well beyond the psychoanalyst's couch since Jung first described the concept, and most people who now practise it do so outside formal analysis altogether. Journaling is the most widely taught method: writing down a strong irritation at someone else's behaviour and then asking, deliberately, where the same trait shows up in oneself, on the reasoning that projection is easiest to catch at the moment it is happening.
Dreamwork remains close to Jung's own method, since dream figures who are threatening, repulsive or shameful are read as likely stand-ins for shadow material the dreamer's waking mind will not otherwise admit. Active imagination, Jung's technique of holding a dream image or a felt emotion in a waking, half-directed reverie and letting it develop rather than analysing it from outside, is taught today in workshops with little of its original clinical framing.
Internal Family Systems therapy, developed independently by Richard Schwartz, has become a common modern vehicle for shadow work despite not using Jung's vocabulary, since its model of exiled and protective inner parts maps closely onto disowned material seeking integration. Group formats exist as well, most visibly in men's work descending from Robert Bly's mythopoetic movement, where shared ritual and confrontation are used to surface material that individual reflection alone tends to protect. Across all these formats the same caution recurs in the literature: shadow material is not always safely met alone, and work that surfaces genuine trauma can require a trained guide rather than a workbook.