This is von Franz speaking — the passage comes from her half of the volume, *The Inferior Function* — and the recipe she offers is deceptively simple: don't live it directly, give it a vessel. The fourth function, precisely because it is least differentiated, hits the ego as elemental demand — not as nuance but as flood. To meet that flood concretely, either inwardly or outwardly, is to be swept. The alchemical image of the sealed spherical vessel isn't decoration; it is functional. A sphere has no corners where pressure accumulates, no weak seam. Fantasy — active imagination — holds the inferior function at one remove, not to suppress it but to let it move without destroying the structure around it.

What this means in practice is that the painting, the writing, the movement, becomes the actual site of contact with what is least available in you. Not a preparation for contact, not a symbol of it. The form is the meeting. Von Franz is careful here: active imagination was, in Jung's estimation, practically the only means. That "practically" carries weight. It is not a technique you reach for when more direct approaches haven't worked — it is the recognition that direct approach to the inferior function is, by definition, not available to the ego that needs it most.