Edinger is describing a structure, but the structure conceals a pressure. The Self accepts because it is total — nothing can be antithetical to what holds everything. That is a genuinely different logic from the one most people bring to self-acceptance, which is conditional: I will accept myself once the unacceptable parts are sufficiently reduced, sublimated, or explained. The ego-Self axis, as Edinger reads it, runs in the opposite direction — strength flows down from a center that never needed the reduction in the first place.

What catches here is the word "symptom." Edinger does not say the unworthy feeling is a mistake or a distortion. He says it is diagnostic — a sign that the axis has been damaged, that the ego is cut off from the accepting center, not that the center has withdrawn its acceptance. The distinction matters. Shame tends to be experienced as evidence of its own conclusions: I feel unworthy, therefore I am. Edinger's frame refuses that move. The feeling of unworthiness is not disclosure of fact but disclosure of disconnection, which means the question shifts from "am I acceptable?" to something more vertiginous — what severed the line, and what does the soul do in that severance?