Neumann is describing something the soul finds almost unbearable to relinquish: the sense that there is a place prior to conflict, prior to the wound of becoming a particular person. The child archetype's hermaphroditism is not an image of innocence in any sentimental sense — it is an image of completeness that has not yet been purchased at the cost of everything incompatible with it. Ego-separation is precisely the loss of that total containment, and the psyche keeps returning to this figure not because it is regressive (though regression is always possible) but because the loss is real. Something was surrendered in becoming conscious, and the Divine Child names what was surrendered.

The risk the passage quietly carries is pneumatic. "Invincibility," "eternality," "light and consciousness" — these are the words a soul reaches for when the ratio of transcendence is running hard, when the image of wholeness-before-differentiation becomes a destination rather than a description. The child is not a place you return to; it is, as Neumann reads Jung, simultaneously beginning and end — which means it marks the edges of a process you are always already inside, never above. What the archetype discloses is not a recoverable origin but the structure of a movement that includes its own loss from the start.