“Albright is remembered as one of Yellowstone’s great figures, a beloved and heroic administrator, but in fact his legacy is ambivalent.”
-from Yellowstone by David Quammen, National Geographic, 2016
David and I both make mistakes such as this one. We all do. I like David’s work. But in this case, he means “ambiguous” or some similar word. “Ambivalent” is a word coined by Freud to describe a state of mind of one or another of his patients toward someone or something else. A person can be ambivalent. A legacy cannot. So you could say, “I was ambivalent about going to my mother’s birthday party because I love her but she also drives me crazy.” Or you could say, “The source of my discomfort when I’m around my mother is ambiguous to me. I’ve never understood it.”