The psychoanalytic framework has long dominated the discussion, but contemporary feminist and other critical theories have expanded our understanding significantly. The "maternal feminist criticism" suggests that we are culturally constructed, but also recognizes the embodied experiences of mothers, offering a "double voice" that shifts between subject and object, passive and active, resistant and conforming positions.

Whether in the pages of a novel by Ian McEwan or on a screen in a film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the mother-son knot remains eternal—sometimes a noose, sometimes a lifeline, but always, always the first tie that binds us to the world.

By the 1980s and 90s, cinema fractured the archetype into two distinct, often overlapping, categories: the devouring mother and the absent mother.