Von Franz is naming a discrimination that almost no one actually makes. The pull backward and the pull forward announce themselves in identical phenomenological clothing — both feel like relief, both feel like escape from what currently presses. The lazy afternoon, the sudden desire to drop everything, the fantasy of starting over somewhere new: each of these can be either regression or genuine renewal, and the soul cannot tell them apart by feel alone. That is the hard center of what she is pointing at.

The difficulty — not to name it too cleanly — is that the logic of not-suffering runs through both directions equally. The infantile pull backward promises that if one retreats far enough into helplessness, someone or something will take over; the impulse forward promises that if one moves toward the new, the weight of the present will dissolve. Both are bypass. But von Franz is not collapsing the distinction: she is insisting it exists and that the work is learning to read which is which in this moment, in this situation, without a formula. Consciousness cannot be borrowed for that reading. No general principle survives contact with the specific case. The discrimination is always local, always present-tense, and always costs something to make.