Greene is naming something the depth-psychology tradition does constantly and rarely admits: it spiritualizes the underworld in order to make it bearable. The unconscious becomes a treasury, a resource, a generous provider of wholeness — and in the same breath, the terror that actually lives there is edited out. Pluto is not generous. The Roman Pluto held his subjects because no one left; his wealth was the wealth of what does not return. When we dress that figure in the language of fertile plenty, we are not engaging him — we are bargaining with him from a safe distance, hoping propitiation will substitute for descent.

The anxiety Greene names is the anxiety of fixation — the soul genuinely stuck, genuinely tormented, not on its way to anything. What the euphemism cannot tolerate is a suffering that does not redeem, a darkness that does not eventually deliver the goods. But that intolerance is the clue. The desperate need to make Pluto generous is precisely the measure of how much the soul fears what Pluto actually holds: material that stays material, weight that does not volatilize, a grief or a compulsion or a shame that sits in the body and does not transform on schedule. The wholeness language is real comfort. It is also a way of not going down.