Neumann is describing an equation, but what the equation actually names is a way of being in the world before the subject-object split completed itself — before "I" and "it" stabilized into the grammar we now call common sense. Woman, body, vessel, world are not metaphors for each other here; they are genuinely not yet separated. The container and the contained have not divided. To stand inside that logic is not a philosophical position one adopts; it is a perceptual field one either inhabits or has already left.

What makes this difficult to read now is that we receive it from inside the very departure Neumann is trying to describe. The word "matriarchal" slides, almost automatically, into a historical claim — a stage we passed through, a phase we outgrew — and the moment that slide happens, the equation becomes an artifact rather than a living description. But Neumann's real subject is the psychic cost of the departure: what the ego gains in clarity and definition, it pays for in severance from the body-world that once held it without asking. The vessel that was the world becomes, after the split, the thing the soul keeps trying to return to — in the beloved, in the bottle, in the ocean, in the room where someone once held us without condition. The formula doesn't describe prehistory. It describes what the psyche was before it learned to refuse containment.