Depression and resentment are not failures of will — they are receipts. The soul keeps records of everything the image requires it to disown, and it presents the bill without mercy. What Greene is pointing at here is not a flaw in mothering but a flaw in the logic of perfection itself: the belief that if the image is held rigorously enough, the darkness will stay away. It will not. It was never separate from the light to begin with. The axis Greene names — good mother and terrible mother as forever conjoined poles — means that every act of suppression is simultaneously an act of inflation, because what gets pushed underground does not diminish; it accumulates charge, picks up the full voltage of the archetype, and returns as something far larger and more ungovernable than the original anger ever was.

The woman in this passage is not pathologically angry. She is someone who tried to pay in advance — tried to buy safety through goodness — and discovered that the unconscious does not honor that currency. The Terrible Mother walks in not because the woman failed but because the strategy of perfection always, structurally, fails. Anger and self-interest are not enemies of care; they are what keeps care from hollowing the carer out entirely.