Edinger's insistence that this is "a fact" rather than a theory tells you something worth pausing over. The appeal to collective verification — "the experience of many people" — is doing real rhetorical work, preempting the question before it can be asked. But notice what the argument then concedes: the Self cannot be defined because it exceeds the instrument of definition. The ego cannot grasp what is larger than itself. That is not a proof; it is a structural claim that forecloses falsification by design. What cannot be circumscribed by the ego cannot be contradicted by the ego either.

This matters because the Self, in this framing, is exactly what the soul reaches for when suffering becomes unbearable. The "objective center" that holds consciousness and the unconscious together, the transpersonal reality larger than you — this is the grammar of relief. If it is real, it relieves. If it relieves, that is taken as evidence of its reality. Hillman understood the circularity and refused the centering; for him, psyche is intrinsically multiple, and any single center is a theological preference smuggled in as psychology. That is not a minor quibble. It is a different account of what the soul is for — plurality held in tension rather than unity approached asymptotically. Edinger's "fact" and Hillman's pluralism are not reconcilable; reading both is how the question stays alive.