Jung is watching something happen that the ego cannot make happen by deciding to. The child-symbol does not appear because consciousness worked hard enough, reasoned carefully enough, or finally understood the problem correctly. It appears because the psyche has a stake in development that runs ahead of what the ego knows it wants. "Anticipates a nascent state of consciousness" — the symbol arrives before the consciousness it is pointing toward exists. This is a strange kind of futurity, and it is worth sitting with: something in the psyche already lives in the next configuration while the ego is still locked in the present conflict.

What the passage makes plain, and what is easy to miss in the word "redemptive," is that the operative move is detachment, not resolution. The conflict between the opposites does not get solved; the conscious mind gets lifted out of the position in which the conflict was intractable. Abandonment — Jung's word, and deliberately harsh — is the structural requirement. The child cannot individuate while still held by the source. Neither, apparently, can the ego. The symbol does not offer a way through the tension; it offers the loss of the ground on which the tension was standing. What looks like rescue is really a severance the ego would not have chosen on its own.