Von Franz is not describing a failure of willpower or moral clarity — she is describing what happens when moral clarity is precisely the problem. The ego that takes an upright ethical stand, that commits itself to being the good, the right, the principled side of the conflict, achieves something genuine: it sharpens the opposition until the two forces cannot coexist. And then they hang there, suspended, neither resolved nor dissolved, the tension held by nothing but the ego's insistence on having been correct.

This is the shape of a great deal of suffering that never gets named as suffering — the person who has done everything right, who has genuinely faced the shadow and not flinched, and who finds that facing it honestly has locked them into an impasse rather than releasing them from one. The wish here is old: that integrity would resolve the conflict, that looking clearly at the worst of oneself would purchase some relief from it. Von Franz is saying it does not work that way. The shadow does not respond to being taken seriously with a good-faith surrender. What it requires is something the ego finds nearly impossible — not a moral decision about it, but a willingness to remain in the tension without adjudicating who wins. Civilization, she implies, has never learned this. Neither has the person convinced that the problem is ethical before it is psychological.