Neumann is careful not to promise comfort here, though the sentence can be read as offering it. "Making friends" sounds amenable, social, manageable — but the shadow is not a difficult colleague you eventually warm to. It is the portion of the psyche that has been refused, which means it carries the specific texture of what you could not afford to be. The friendship Neumann names is not reconciliation in any ordinary sense. It is a willingness to remain in proximity to what you have spent considerable energy not seeing.

The self, in this framing, does not stand apart from that refusal waiting patiently to be claimed. It stands behind the dark aspect — which is to say, you do not reach it by going around the shadow, or by ascending past it, or by understanding it theoretically from a safe distance. The topology is unavoidable: the shadow is the passage, not the obstacle beside the passage. What resists this most reliably is the hope that there is another route — a spiritual practice that thins the boundary without the encounter, a depth of self-knowledge that substitutes for actual proximity. Neumann is quiet about this hope, but the architecture of his sentence rules it out.