Jung is describing something genuinely powerful here, and the power is worth taking seriously — not because it leads somewhere safe, but because it accurately maps the phenomenology. An archetype does seize the whole personality. The numinous is not a metaphor for intensity; it is the clinical observation that certain encounters reorganize you from the inside, that you do not choose them so much as find yourself already changed. That much is honest.

What wants watching is the sentence about "lower" and "higher." The scare quotes are Jung's own, and they register a hesitation he does not quite sustain. The transformer-metaphor quietly reinstalls the pneumatic logic: libido is on its way somewhere upward, symbols are the mechanism of its ascent, and feeling ratifies the direction because it correctly senses that the numen is real. But the numinous is not evidence of elevation. A descent can be just as seizuring as an ascent, just as productive of conviction, just as capable of reorganizing the personality — and it does not arrive with faith in anything above. The archetype of the addict produces exactly the faith Jung describes. So does the archetype of the abuser. The energy is neutral to the direction; the seizing is neutral to the outcome. That the soul accords the experience its highest values tells you about the soul's hunger, not about where the symbol was taking it.