Woodman is not offering a definition of love here — she is refusing one. The formulation "recognition and acceptance of the total individual" sounds, at first pass, like therapeutic warmth, the kind of thing that decorates greeting cards and recovery workbooks. But the sentence that follows changes the pressure entirely: the feminine contains conflict and suffering, does not resolve them, does not transfigure them into something more bearable. It holds them. The container is not a crucible for transmutation; it is not heading anywhere. Suffering and conflict are the only way to grow — full stop, no because, no therefore.

This is where the passage resists the pneumatic pull most sharply. Woodman is writing against every version of love that functions as rescue — the idea that to be loved is to be relieved, that the right container will finally end the difficulty. What she names instead is a love that remains present to the difficulty without removing it, a consciousness that neither rejects nor redeems what it holds. The word "safely" is doing harder work than it appears: not safe as in protected from, but safe enough to remain inside what presses. That is the distinction the whole passage turns on, and it is not a comfortable one.