Ayn Rand was an extreme individualist, in reaction to the Soviet collectivism she experienced in her childhood. Her novel Atlas Shrugged is an allegorical story that tends to polarize people into those who see corrupt parasitical collectivists creeping into influential positions everywhere, and those who see it as an ode to childish selfishness without zero regard for their fellow man.

Rand went off the deep end in beaming admiration for William Hickman, a serial killer who dismembered a young girl named Marion Parker:

Rand saw in Hickman the perfect Nietzschean “superman” — “a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.” When she read this quote by him in the newspaper — “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” — she wrote in her journals that this was “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

This serial killer-admiring Ayn Rand is a mirror you can use to reflect yourself in. You are missing out on the Collective Consciousness if you do cannot separate yourself from her on this. On the other hand if you do not see the Shadow side that she embraces here, then you are repressing that shadow instead of holding it out in front of you and studying it.