Marriage Quote by William Goldman

Goldman’s line is a marital joke built like a warning label: don’t bring a pocketknife to a psychoanalytic gunfight. The surface gag is obvious - the husband thinks he’s debating “hostility” as a discrete, manageable issue; the wife, armed with Freud and credentials, treats it as a symptom with a backstory. In that mismatch sits the comedy and the threat. You’re not arguing about tone anymore; you’re volunteering for an excavation.

The phrase “certified Freudian” does double work. “Certified” adds bureaucratic authority to something people already caricature as omniscient and invasive. “Freudian” signals a whole interpretive regime: slips, defenses, childhood origins, sex and aggression as motors. Goldman doesn’t need to mention any of that explicitly because the cultural shorthand is doing the heavy lifting. The husband hears “hostility” and hopes for a negotiated ceasefire; the Freudian hears “hostility” and smells repression, displacement, maybe a neat little Oedipal vignette. Every denial becomes evidence, every protest a tell.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at the way expert language can dominate intimate space. Therapy talk, once imported into a relationship, can turn ordinary friction into a diagnostic performance where one person controls the terms of reality. Goldman’s wit is cynical but not cruel: it’s less anti-wife than anti-argument, suggesting that marriage isn’t a courtroom and that psychoanalysis - especially in pop form - can make it one.

Context matters: Goldman wrote in an era when Freudianism had seeped into mainstream conversation, becoming both prestige and punchline. The quote plays that cultural moment like a well-timed rimshot.