Von Franz is pointing at something the tradition keeps trying to soften: the work does not begin after the darkness lifts. It is conducted inside it. The nigredo is not a threshold you cross and then start — it is the operative condition, the only place where the washing has any effect at all.

That word, washing — *ablutio* in the Latin texts — is not metaphor for self-improvement or affirmations of change. The alchemists understood it chemically: you wash to remove the wrong attachments, the sulphurous impurities that have fused with what you actually are. The washing is repetitive precisely because the soul does not release its false bonds in a single gesture. It releases them in the tenth washing, the fortieth, the one you do when you no longer believe it is working.

What makes the nigredo intolerable is not its pain but its formlessness. Depression dissolves the structures we used to know ourselves by, and the instinct is to climb out — toward light, toward meaning, toward a narrative that reassures. The hard work von Franz describes is the refusal of that instinct: staying at the vessel, continuing the operation, trusting that what is being separated from what matters more than any consolation the ascent might offer.