still the legitimate wife. Or the patient may be the ex-husband, who
feels harassed by daily calls from his ex-wife. Or the patient may be
the resentful new wife, angry at his ex-wife’s intrusion into their life
together or at the confusion created by the ex-wife if she insists on
using her ex-husband’s name on charge accounts and other docu-
ments.
CHILDREN
A Hera woman usually has children because this function is part
of the role of being a wife. She will not have much maternal instinct,
however, unless Demeter is also an important archetype. Nor will
she enjoy doing things with her children unless Artemis or Athena
are also present.
If a Hera woman has children and can’t form an archetypal
mother-child bond, her children will sense her failure as a lack of
love and protection. Even if she is a full-time wife and mother and
is physically very much present in their lives, they will feel a lack
of closeness and will sense some emotional abandonment.
When a Hera woman must decide between her husband or her
children, she will usually sacrifice the children’s best interests in
order to keep her husband. I often see adults in my practice who
were raised in traditionally structured families, where the father
was the head of the household, breadwinner, and petty tyrant. Such
patients experienced the mother as supportive and nurturing, but
she never acted as a buffer between her husband and the children.
The children were always on their own in confrontations with their
father, no matter how unreasonable or out of hand he got.
At first in their analysis, such patients feel that the difficulty with
the father is in the forefront as they recall the painful parts of their
childhood. Sometimes they feel a need to confront their fathers in
the present and, if possible, get some acknowledgment or apology
for events in the past. At this point, the part played by their mothers
comes into awareness.
One patient, a professional woman in her late thirties, who had
running battles with her father all through her adolescence, said,
“Nothing I ever did was good enough. In his eyes, I was either crazy
for thinking about it, or too incompe-
Goddesses in Everywoman