The feelings which a woman has toward a young child are often a very complicated mixture of love and hate, need and power. We take the love for granted as the main and necessary component of maternity. But there is inevitably going to be hate, because the birth of a child marks the death of the puella in a woman. Along with the mundane issues of responsibility on a practical level and the next fifteen years signed and sealed with a "never again" feeling about the loss of personal freedom, there are also deeper symbolic issues which are concerned with fate, time, age, and the leaving behind of eternal girlhood; and also with separation from one's own mother, and from identification with the eternal daughter who can always go back home again. That is the death-marriage which is embodied in the Hades-Persephone myth. There is often a great deal of negative feeling in a woman toward her baby, and although this is natural and inevitable, it is disturbing if one is identified with the collective opinion that one must be completely and sacrificially loving all the time or one is a Terrible Mother. The desire to destroy is often part of the experience of giving birth, and there is an aspect of this which is archetypal. Many animals act this out, as though one gives birth in order to provide food for oneself to feed on. Fish, for example, do this immediately; they swallow their offspring and it is the best meal in weeks. But to acknowledge such feelings raises a deep moral problem, because there is a difference between experiencing something and acting it out. Often refusing to experience it forces one to act it out unconsciously. If this challenge is not met, and the negative feelings are totally suppressed, then the unconscious of the child will pick them up. The Terrible Mother always lives side by side with the Good Mother.
— Howard Sasportas Liz Greene
Greene is pointing at something the collective ideal of motherhood cannot afford to know: that the birth of a child is simultaneously the death of the woman who was not yet a mother. The puella — eternal daughter, girl who can always return home — does not survive the birth. She is the sacrifice. And the hate, the urge to devour, the rage at what has been foreclosed forever: these are not failures of love. They are the soul's accurate perception of what has actually happened.
The moral trap Greene names is precise. If a woman accepts the collective demand that she be only the Good Mother — sacrificially loving, never ambivalent, never murderous — she does not thereby become the Good Mother. She splits. The Terrible Mother is not an archetype that absence invites in from outside; she is already there, the shadow of the ideal that pretends she isn't. What gets suppressed does not dissolve. It migrates — into the body of the child, who grows up knowing something the mother's conscious mind refused to hold.
Persephone's marriage to Hades is not a story about violation only. It is the mythological grammar for what any real crossing into new life actually costs: descent is the form of it, and something that lived before does not come back up. Greene asks whether a woman can stand to know what she has genuinely lost rather than idealize it away. That capacity — not to master the negative feeling but to bear it consciously — is what keeps it from traveling.
Howard Sasportas Liz Greene·The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1·1987