Another thought about Snape's psychology

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 187555

What if Snape's subconscious motive is not jealousy per se but the sexual humiliation of losing Lily to James? 

By definition, a subconscious motive is both unknown and unknowable to the person who has it. He is not merely unaware of it, he would utterly  reject any attempt to make him recognize it. He either cannot explain why he acts as he does, or he unconsciously invents explanations which seem plausible, at least to him. For a mind as creative as Snape's, that would be no problem.

In that case, all the reasons Snape gives to justify his hatred for Harry, however valid they may seem to him, are only defense mechanisms and masks which allow him to repress a feeling he cannot accept, perhaps because he never came to terms with his own desire for Lily.

I can't prove this directly from canon, but it does seem that  the two situations where Snape is angriest and most beyond reason are ones in which he is forced to confront his humiliation by James, in SWM and also in the Shrieking Shack when Harry says, "just because they made a fool of you at school."

This theory might also throw some light on why Snape was not satisfied with Voldemort's promise to save Lily for him when, as far as we know, he had trusted the Dark Lord up to that time. Voldemort assumed that Snape wanted to save Lily because he desired her. But if Snape himself was not so comfortable with that idea, if he was in fact repressing his physical desire for her, as the silver doe would seem to indicate, then he might actually be disgusted by the Dark Lord's assumption that he wanted her.

Pippin