Jung's correction of Freud here is surgical: the numinous is not a regression, not the infant's blurred boundary with the mother dissolved and then mourned as adult consciousness sharpens. It is a category in its own right, irreducible, belonging to the structure of psychic life rather than to its prehistory. Freud's "oceanic feeling" diagnoses the experience as residue — something left over from a developmental stage we have passed through. Jung refuses this. What overwhelms the ego in a numinous encounter is not the past flooding back; it is the soul making contact with energies that were never merely personal to begin with.

What Kalsched quietly surfaces here is the cost of that refusal. If the numinous is structural, not archaic, then you cannot explain it away by tracing it to infancy, and you cannot cure someone of needing it. Homo religiosus is not a developmental stage to outgrow. The soul oriented toward something beyond itself is not pathological longing in disguise — though it can, of course, become that, and the history of spirituality is largely the history of that becoming. The question the passage presses, without quite asking it, is whether contact with the numinosum actually transforms anything, or whether the encounter is itself the bypass — the daimonic or the sublime functioning as a route around the suffering it was supposed to illuminate.