Early and mid-20th-century cinema, heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, often split the mother-son relationship into two extreme archetypes.
If you are developing a specific creative project or academic paper around this theme, I can help you expand it.g., sci-fi mothers, true crime adaptations) For instance, the Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith,
Lawrence's novel is just one touchstone in a rich literary tradition. The mother-son relationship has been explored in its most destructive forms, as seen in the works of authors who often drew from personal experience. For instance, the Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, who was raised by a widowed mother, repeatedly depicted these relationships as "toxic and destructive". His short story "Mother and Son" portrays a protagonist whose life is drained of joy by a "spiteful, hateful woman" whose main pleasure is "constantly humiliating and emasculating her son". Smith’s work is a stark reminder that the cost of duty and isolation can be so high that severing the tie is the only path to survival. Beyond the Western canon, the theme is universal
Beyond the Western canon, the theme is universal. Film critic Jeong Min-chi notes that in Indian cinema, motherhood is synonymous with “caregiving, selflessness, and sacrifice,” with the mother being a symbol of well-being who is burdened with shaping the nation's future citizens. This cultural pressure on the mother-son dynamic creates its own unique set of tensions and narrative possibilities, showing that while the bond is psychologically universal, its specific expression is always culturally mediated. Beyond the Western canon
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains the archetypal example. Norman Bates is the ultimate "mama's boy," whose psychosis is rooted in a possessive, domineering, and ultimately . Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) brilliantly inverts this trope. Here, the horror stems not from a mother's suffocating love, but from her "maternal indifference and ambivalence". The film is a reimagining of "maternal abjection," where the source of horror is the mother's inability to feel a proper bond with her child following a traumatic loss, turning the domestic space into a nightmare of repressed grief.