As child is equivalent with imagination, the mother’s language becomes unimaginative, imperative, abstract. As the child is growth, she becomes static and empty, unable to react with spontaneous novelty. As the child is timeless, eternal, she becomes time-bound, scheduled, hurried. Her morality becomes one-sidedly responsible and disciplinarian. Her sense of future and hope is displaced on her actual child; thereby postpartum depression may become a chronic undertone. As her actual child carries her feelings of vulnerability, she may over-attend to it to the neglect of herself, with consequent resentments. Also, her thought processes become restricted to adult forms of reason so that the ghost voices and faces, animals, the scenes of eidectic imagination become estranged and feel like pathological delusions and hallucinations. And her language loses its emotion and incantational power; she explains and argues.

James Hillman, ‘The Bad Mother’