Motherhood Quote by Germaine Greer

A jab this compact is doing more than landing a punchline; it’s smuggling in a whole critique of intellectual lineage. Greer frames psychoanalysis as a patrilineal enterprise: Freud gets the sanctioned title of “father,” while the “mother” is conspicuously missing - not dead, not unknown, simply never granted existence. The wit is surgical because it turns an honorific into evidence. If a field can celebrate its founding father, Greer implies, it can also expose the power arrangement that decides who counts as an origin.

The subtext is feminist and institutional: psychoanalysis didn’t just emerge from Freud’s genius; it emerged from a culture that naturalized male authority as the default author of theory, diagnosis, and desire. “No mother” points to the erasure of women’s intellectual labor (patients, collaborators, rivals) and also to the gendered assumptions built into the discipline itself. Freud’s models of femininity - famously preoccupied with lack, envy, development defined by deviation from the male norm - read differently when you notice how thoroughly the mother is treated as an object of analysis, not a producer of knowledge.

Context matters: Greer comes out of second-wave feminism, when taking apart the supposedly “neutral” sciences of mind was a major front in the culture wars. The line works because it’s a paradox you can’t unsee: psychoanalysis is obsessed with mothers, yet structurally motherless. That gap is the indictment.