Neumann is mapping a real historical movement here, but the mapping carries a concealed valuation that matters. "True self" is doing enormous weight-bearing work in that sentence — it names consciousness as home and the unconscious as alien territory, and then genders the alien. The move is ancient. Spirit ascends, matter descends; the knowable self rises above the unruly, feminine, body-bound dark. What gets called masculine culture is, on this reading, the long project of preferring the clear over the murky, the formed over the formless.

The problem is not that Neumann is wrong to notice the historical dynamic — that preference did organize Western civilization for two millennia. The problem is the word "true." When the self in the unconscious is called a stranger, a slight shudder passes through the sentence, the kind that precedes an exorcism. Hillman's entire career was a refusal of this framing: the soul is not a problem consciousness has to solve. The unconscious does not become more itself the closer it approaches light. Its speech is night-speech, and night-speech is not deficient day-speech. To hear what the psyche is saying at depth requires tolerating the strangeness Neumann is quietly asking us to overcome.