Jung is writing as a doctor here, not as a metaphysician, and that distinction matters. He is not arguing that death is a transition — he is arguing that the psyche functions better when it can hold that thought. The frame is explicitly hygienic, pragmatic, almost biological. What impairs vital functions is not death itself but the anticipatory dread of a house collapsing, a future that forecloses rather than opens.

Notice what is doing the actual work: not belief, but orientation. The soul, for Jung, requires a directionality in the second half of life, something toward which the will can move without flinching. Strip that away — insist on strict materialist honesty, refuse every supramundane narrative — and you do not free the psyche, you strand it. The energy that would otherwise move through the second half of life stops in its tracks, rerouted into avoidance.

But the comfort Jung recommends is not the same thing as consolation. He does not say death is nothing to fear; he says that relating to it as transition makes living possible. That is a narrower, harder claim. The house is still going to fall. The question is whether you can dwell in it while it stands — which requires tolerating, not dissolving, the knowledge that it will not stand forever.