What Hall is tracking here is the ratio of desire in its most intimate register — the soul's wager that if I find the one who carries what I cannot hold in myself, I will not have to suffer the poverty of that unlived interior. The fascination he describes is real and not trivial: it is the soul's own image returning to it from across a room, and the enhancement of personal worth that follows is not delusion but recognition. Something genuinely numinous moves in that encounter. The trap is not the feeling but the outsourcing — the quiet agreement that the other person will house what belongs to the psyche's own labor.

Projection ends, Hall says, inevitably, with varying degrees of animosity. The animosity is diagnostic. It names where the expectation was, what the soul had silently demanded, and what the actual human being declined to go on providing. The failure of the projection is not tragedy but disclosure: the soul image has been returned to sender, and with it the question of what it was doing out there in the first place. A genuine relationship with another person can only begin once the fantasy has been stripped of its borrowed divinity — not because love diminishes but because the other person was never equipped to be a solution to the soul's unfinished business with itself.