Hollis is describing something real — the ego's dethronement, the opening of a larger dialogue — and the description is genuinely useful. But hear what is quietly running beneath it: the Self as teleological purposiveness, as magnificence exceeding what a single lifetime can incarnate. This is the pneumatic current doing what it does best, which is to make the soul's suffering legible as a threshold on the way to something grander. The humbled ego "begins the dialogue" — and already the frame has converted the wreckage of the first adulthood into a corridor.

Jung himself held the Self with more ambivalence than this passage admits. The Self in the Collected Works is not simply a guarantor of meaning; it is indifferent, overwhelming, capable of devastating the personality it also organizes. What Hollis gives us here is the more consoling reading — the one that makes the Middle Passage survivable by promising it has a destination. That consolation is not false. It is, however, a selection. The soul in the middle of the passage is not asking about magnificence; it is asking whether the ground will hold. Whether that question gets answered is not something teleological purposiveness determines.