The concept of our psychological “shadow,” i.e., those disowned or repressed parts of ourselves that are too dark to admit, is a well-known working concept in psychology. But the eminent twentieth-century Jungian Robert Johnson coined the term “golden shadow” to describe something else. Our golden shadow refers not to the dark parts we have a hard time owning up to but to the bright parts we are afraid to own. “The gold is related to our higher calling,” Johnson writes, “and this can be hard to accept.”
