Narcissistic Mother Quotes & Sayings

Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us. — Danu Morrigan

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school. — Koren Zailckas

As masculine self-consciousness grows stronger, the stage of matriarchy is followed by that of division. Symptomatic of this transition period is the twin-brother motif in mythology, which expresses the mutual affinity of opposites. This division turns destructively against itself in self-mutilation and suicide. As we saw, in uroboric and matriarchal castration the will of the Great Mother was paramount. But the centroversion tendency which underlies the ego-hero's struggle for self-preservation and which first takes the form of anxiety, advances beyond the passive, narcissistic stage and turns into resistance, defiance, and aggression directed against the Great Mother, as illustrated mythologically in the story of Hippolytus. — Erich Neumann

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life. — Alice Miller

Birthday parties and events will be thrown for the child to elicit admiration and attention from others. However, the child will be punished, berated and humiliated in the middle of the party in front of an audience if they behave against the expectations of the self-absorbed mother. The party only serves to generate additional narcissistic supply for the mother, not a pleasurable event for the child. Events are scheduled, changed, and cancelled in order to exert and announce control over the child. They make it very apparent to the child that the mother can both give pleasure and take pleasure away by these means. — J.B. Snow

There's a definition of narcissism that when a parent is narcissistic, instead of the child seeing himself reflected in the mother's face and the mother's joy, the child of the narcissistic parent feels like, 'What can I do to make her okay, to make her happy?' — Susan Sullivan

Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her. — Alice Miller

I know," he said in almost bored contemplation. "My manners suck. I like to chalk it up to a dissatisfying childhood."
"I'd chalk it up to that narcissistic personality disorder laces with a smidgen of schizophrenia. Your mother would be proud. — Darynda Jones

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature. — Koren Zailckas

The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a "loving" mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation. — Erich Fromm

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones. — Koren Zailckas

The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself. — Sandra Cisneros

A narcissistic mother sees her daughter, more than her son, as a reflection and extension of herself rather than as a separate person with her own identity. She puts pressure on her daughter to act and react to the world and her surroundings in the exact manner that Mom would, rather than in a way that feels right for the daughter. Thus, the daughter is always scrambling to find the "right" way to respond to — Karyl McBride