Edinger maps the cycle cleanly, and the mapping does real work — inflation, alienation, reconnection, repeated throughout a life rather than achieved once and transcended. That insistence on repetition is the important word. The cycle does not terminate. There is no final reunion that ends the story, no third stage that holds and stays held. The ego-Self axis is not arrival; it is a temporarily restored relationship that will break again, because the ego's separation from the Self is not a pathology to be cured but a structural necessity of consciousness itself.

What the Christian-trinitarian overlay quietly carries, though, is a direction — Father to Son to Spirit implies forward movement, progressive unfolding, an arc that has somewhere to go. Edinger is careful: he says "corresponds precisely," not "derives from" or "culminates in." But the correspondence does its suggestive work. It quietly loads the reunion phase with a pneumatic freight — the Holy Ghost, breath, spirit, the lifting upward — that the raw psychological description of ego-Self reconnection does not actually require. The reconnection Edinger describes may be just as earthy, just as partial, just as capable of producing anguish as integration as it produces relief. The trinity is a brilliant analogical key. It is not a promise about where the repetition ends.