Neumann is not offering consolation here. The Self he names is a limit-concept — which means the ego's habitual strategy of apprehending, cataloguing, and thereby managing what it encounters runs out precisely at this boundary. The affirmation he calls for cannot be performed by the part of you that performs things. That is the genuine difficulty the passage presents, and it is easy to miss because "affirm your totality" sounds encouraging, almost therapeutic, until you register that the totality includes everything the conscious mind finds inadmissible about itself.

What the passage is quietly refusing is the idea that wholeness arrives when you have understood yourself well enough — when the inventory is complete, when the shadow has been sufficiently examined and filed. The Self exceeds that project by definition. It cannot be made an object of the ego's scrutiny without ceasing to be what it is. Neumann is drawing a line between depth psychology and self-improvement: one works at the edge of what consciousness can hold, the other assumes the ego is large enough to contain the process. The distinction is not semantic. The ego that believes it can rationally apprehend its own center is already operating inside the very limitation Neumann is pointing at — and the pointing does not dissolve the limitation, it only makes its presence honest.