Laura Marling Quotes

Freud: If it's not one thing, it's your mother

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

Men often marry their mothers.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

I'm a proper mummy's boy.

I was a real mummy's girl - still am. And as for my father, well, I have an Oedipus complex I'm still working out. I love that man!

'The Pink Lady' rides the Freudian wave. You know, the big lady, the relationship to mom - those things are obviously part of that piece.

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.

I slept with my mother until I was nine years old. It was OK for the first few years, and then I don't know what happened. I just couldn't do it anymore. I mean, sleeping with the same woman, night after night. Boring!

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.

Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

My mother really was the strength in our family. She would sort of keep us in line and I admired her very much .

Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.

Most men are secretly still mad at their mothers for throwing away their comic books. They would be valuable now.

From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.