The mother’s desire toward her son is contradictory possession, not simple castration.
Evidence
Freud believes that the mother-son relationship contains the least ambivalence; but in fact in motherhood, as in marriage and love, woman has an ambiguous attitude to masculine transcendence; if her conjugal or love life has made her hostile to men, she will find satisfaction in dominating the male reduced to his infantile figure; she will treat the arrogantly pretentious sex organ with an ironic familiarity: at times she will frighten the child by announcing she will cut it off if he does not behave. Even if she is humble and more peaceful and respects the future hero in her son, she does what she can to reduce him to his immanent reality in order to ensure that he is really hers: just as she treats her husband like a child, she treats her child like a baby. It is too rational, too simple, to think she wishes to castrate her son; her dream is more contradictory: she wants him to be infinite and yet fit in the palm of her hand, dominating the whole world and kneeling before her. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1519
Categorization
- XREF: Reverses Freud’s claim of least ambivalence in the mother-son bond; connects to the whole project of existentialist-feminist critique of psychoanalysis. — connects to: The mother’s bond with the child is domination, not a penis-substitute — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1508; Possession is a lived, non-thetic relation rather than a known one. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1379
- SEED: Angles on maternal possession as rendering the son immanent — ‘infinite yet fitting in the palm of her hand’ — speaks to ambition/parenting tensions.
Broader Connections
- The mother’s bond with the child is domination, not a penis-substitute
#corroborates(0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1508 - Possession is a lived, non-thetic relation rather than a known one.
#expands(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1379