Neumann is describing what happens when consciousness arrives and cannot tolerate holding two things at once. The original figure — terrible and nourishing in the same breath, the same mouth, the same embrace — gets sorted. The dark half is expelled into a second goddess, a witch, a stepmother, a demon; the bright half is purified into a madonna. This is not an advance. It is a relief that costs something.

What gets lost in the sorting is precisely the *experience* of being held by something that does not owe you kindness. The Great Mother in her undivided form does not reassure. She is not oriented toward your comfort. She gives and she takes back, and these are not separate acts with separate causes — they are one motion. To worship that is to remain in contact with a power that has no obligation to you. To split it is to begin the long project of seeking a goddess who only gives, a love that only nourishes, a divine that has agreed in advance not to wound. The history of Western spirituality is largely the history of that agreement being renegotiated, sought, promised, and quietly broken. The undivided figure does not break the agreement. She never made it.