Jung's claim here is anatomical before it is psychological: the sympathetic system does not wait for permission. By the time a clinician has formed any conscious attitude toward a patient's grief or rage or longing, the body has already moved toward it. Detachment, in this picture, is not a discipline you achieve — it is a story you tell yourself while the contagion is already underway.

This matters because the fantasy of clinical neutrality is itself a ratio: if I am careful enough, if I maintain the right distance, I will not be touched by what touches the patient. That strategy fails not because therapists lack discipline but because it misreads the architecture. The sympathetic system is not a failure of professional composure; it is the channel through which anything true gets transmitted at all.

What Jung permits — and it is permission, not a demand — is the narrower, harder move: becoming conscious of the fact that you are affected. Not resolving it, not purifying it, not making it the subject of a tidy interpretation. The affect arrives first. Awareness follows. The clinical relationship lives in that gap, and so, more quietly, does any relationship in which one person is genuinely present to another's suffering.