Edinger is not making a comforting claim here. The dependence he names cuts in two directions: the ego requires the Self's aliveness to hold together, but the Self requires an ego sturdy enough to receive the impact without either inflating into grandiosity or collapsing into dissolution. Neither pole survives alone. This is what makes the claim clinical rather than mystical — it is not a vision of union or ascent but an observation about structural necessity, the kind a physician makes when noting that bone requires marrow.

What the observation will not let you do is treat ego-strength as an acquisition program. You do not build a stable ego by fortifying it against the irrational, by accumulating competencies, by achieving coherence through discipline alone. The stability comes from contact — and contact means porousness, which means the very vulnerability that most ego-building projects are designed to prevent. The soul that has armored itself most efficiently against wounding is also the one most severed from the source Edinger is pointing at. What presents clinically as a strong ego — defended, productive, well-functioning — may be precisely what has lost the connection he considers load-bearing.