The gold
The bag does not only hold what was shameful. It holds what was too much.
The phrase golden shadow is not Jung’s. It belongs to the generation of analysts and poets who carried his idea into ordinary rooms in the 1980s.
A child’s exuberance in a quiet house, a daughter’s ambition in a family that had other plans for her, a boy’s tenderness among brothers who mocked it: these go into the bag with everything else. The Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson called this the golden shadow, and noticed something odd about it. ‘Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides.’12 It is easier, in the end, to confess a cruelty than a longing.
The gold travels by projection too. It shows up as admiration that tips into ache: the person you cannot stop watching, the life you dismiss a little too quickly as impossible for you, the talent you insist you do not have. Jung’s hardest sentence on the subject is also his kindest. ‘To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.’13 Each of the eight figures carries gold as well as trouble, and the practices attached to them are built to retrieve the one by tolerating the other.
Twenty-four statements. Six minutes. A ranked map of which figures are loudest in you now.
Begin