Jung's interruption is the whole lesson. The woman on the beach has done something that looks like imagination but is actually its opposite: she has kept one foot outside the image, in the part of the mind that knows it is only a fantasy. That knowing is precisely what kills the encounter. A real lion produces fear, or the sudden calculation of escape, or the strange freezing that precedes both — some response that confirms the body has registered something as actual. None of that happened. The lion was allowed to dissolve into a ship because it was never fully met.

This is where active imagination becomes demanding rather than pleasant. The soul does not disclose itself to a spectator. What the image requires is the same stake you would bring to the waking event — and that stake is what most people quietly withhold, because full entry means the lion might not turn into a ship, might not transform into anything consoling at all. It might simply remain a lion. Von Franz is pointing at the half-presence most people call "doing the work" — the careful, supervised distance from which the image is observed, interpreted, appreciated, and ultimately left unchanged. The lion that is never truly met cannot give what it came to give.