Purnima’s Centenary, 26 December 2025

Writing “Life of my mother (1925:2016)” will be considerably harder I find than writing of her death… Freud said in “The Psychology of Women” the mother’s “relation to a son…is quite the most complete relationship between human beings, and the one that is the most free from ambivalence”… It is an enigmatic statement I do not quite agree with, but it has been at the forefront of my mind in recent times; along with a clever Oxford entrance discussion topic from 40 years ago “Our mothers bore us”… so clever, no?

Our mothers bore us, for nine months, then we emerged, so clever, but also Our mothers bore us, we find them boring, so clever, no? That’s Oxford.

Freud’s idea, the clever Oxford sentence, plus two or three other things have been at the forefront of my mind in recent times… A woman I lived with in America denounced me once saying “You’ll go back to India and look after your mother”…Hmmm…

Hmmm…. yes she was 70 when I returned to India, absolutely no doubt in retrospect she managed to make it to 90 only with my help & support. Do I regret the effort made? Not in the slightest. “Mamma’s boy”? Not at all…Just a general affirmation of life with no compromises or shortcuts.

These things and one other have been at the forefront of my mind in recent times, and that has been DH Lawrence… who in Sons and Lovers which I can’t claim to have read, but also elsewhere, alluded to the relationship between son & mother being more subtle than Freud made out.

 

John Wisdom in *Philosophy and Psychoanalysis* and elsewhere talked of how a man’s dead mother may always seem present in a marriage…Woody Allen I seem to recall has a scene where two sets of dead Jewish parents are in bed together with a couple talking incessantly…

More in the book 🙂 …

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