In the first part of Carrie (1974), Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie White gets her first period in the showers at Ewen High, in front of her classmates, who pelt her with sanitary napkins and laugh. She does not know what is happening to her: no one has ever explained it. That afternoon, at home, her mother is waiting. Margaret White, a widow who works at a laundry, the zealot of a faith she has built almost on her own, already knows what happened because the school called her. She does not comfort her. She hits her, forces her to kneel and recites her version of Genesis: Eve was weak, she loosed upon the world a raven called Sin, and the first Sin was intercourse; then came the Curse of Blood. Then she locks her in the prayer closet, a tiny room full of religious images, until Carrie begs forgiveness for a sin she has not committed. Margaret White is the most feared mother in horror fiction, and Mike Flanagan’s miniseries for Prime Video, eight episodes released at once on October 7, 2026, with Samantha Sloyan in the role, has put her back at the center. According to the first reviews, Flanagan portrays her as less monstrous and more frightened; this file reads the Margaret of the novel.
// The theoryGuilt in search of a culprit
Sigmund Freud never wrote a criminology, but he left behind one of his most unsettling ideas. In 1916, in “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” he described criminals from a sense of guilt: people who do not feel guilty because they have offended, but offend because they already felt guilty, and find relief in punishment. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he named the agency that judges from within, the superego, and warned that it can turn cruel toward the ego itself. His followers carried the idea over to crime. In 1925 Theodor Reik wrote of a compulsion to confess bound up with the need for punishment. Anna Freud, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), mapped the maneuvers the ego uses to protect itself from what it cannot tolerate, among them projection: attributing one’s own desire to someone else in order to condemn it outside oneself.
Punishing outside what cannot be forgiven inside
Margaret White does not offend in order to be punished, like Freud’s patients. She does something closely related: she turns her guilt into punishment for someone else. The sexuality she reproaches herself for, the night she conceived Carrie, she later sees in her daughter’s body, in her period, in her breasts, in her prom dress, and she hunts it down there. Margaret’s superego is so ferocious that judging her is not enough; it needs a defendant within reach, and it has one at home. That is why her punishments correct nothing: they do not respond to what Carrie does, but to what Margaret feels.
// The subjectThree scenes in the White house
The novel, assembled from reports, interviews and excerpts from books about the tragedy, lets us see Margaret through several pairs of eyes. The first belongs to a neighbor, Estelle Horan, who remembers a day when Carrie was three: the little girl noticed her sunbathing in a swimsuit and asked about her breasts. Margaret came out screaming, clawed at herself, took her daughter back inside, and a shower of stones that no one could explain fell on the White house. The second scene comes in the second part, on the morning of the prom: Margaret begs Carrie to burn the dress and pray with her, announces that there will be a judgment and, when her daughter refuses, says she washes her hands of it. Carrie answers that Pilate said that. The third is the night of the prom. While Carrie is at the gym, Margaret sharpens a knife in the kitchen, thinking of Abraham and Isaac and of how sin can only be drowned in blood. When Carrie returns home, covered in pig’s blood after laying waste to the town (spoiler), her mother confesses everything: that Ralph, her husband, came home drunk one night and took her, that she felt pleasure and never forgave herself for it, that she thought of killing herself, that she picked up a knife when the labor pains began to make her sacrifice and picked it up again when the girl was three. Then she drives it into Carrie’s shoulder. Carrie stops her heart with her mind.
Margaret White
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// The crackThe old habit of blaming the mother
The psychoanalytic reading of Margaret is seamless, and that is its problem. Karl Popper objected that concepts such as repression or projection explain any behavior after the fact without allowing anything to be predicted or refuted: had Margaret been lenient with her daughter, that too could be read as a defense against guilt. Besides, the novel itself distrusts single explanations. King builds it from documents that contradict one another, and none of them, scientific or journalistic, ever fully explains Carrie or her mother.
There is a more uncomfortable crack. Psychoanalysis has a record of loading onto mothers whatever it could not explain: in 1948 Frieda Fromm-Reichmann coined the idea of the “schizophrenogenic mother,” which blamed mothers for their children’s schizophrenia and has since been discarded. Margaret is an abuser, not a victim of that prejudice, but reading her only from the inside leaves out what surrounds her: a neighbor who saw the scene with the stones, a school that watched the bullying every day, a whole town that looked the other way. Other theories, such as social control or attachment, fit better there. Flanagan’s version, according to reviewers, shifts the focus in that direction.
Abuse that comes with prayers
Abuse linked to religious belief is hard to see from the outside because it presents itself as moral education, and those who inflict it are often convinced they are saving their child. Child protection services in some countries already treat it as a specific risk that calls for its own training. The psychoanalytic reading helps explain why Margaret’s punishment grows as her daughter grows: she does not punish what Carrie does, but what Carrie is. Explaining is not excusing. Margaret White locks up, beats and stabs, and no defense mechanism relieves her of responsibility for doing so.
Three key ideas
- Criminological psychoanalysis, from Freud (1916) and Reik (1925) onward, describes an unconscious guilt that seeks punishment, and Anna Freud (1936) explained projection: condemning one’s own desire in someone else.
- Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, punishes in her daughter’s body the sexuality she cannot forgive in herself, locks her in the prayer closet and, on the night of the prom, stabs her.
- The crack: the reading cannot be falsified, it tends to pin the evil on the mother and it leaves out a town that saw the abuse and did nothing.
Sources · further reading
- Freud, S. (1916). “Einige Charaktertypen aus der psychoanalytischen Arbeit” [“Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work”]. Imago, 4.
- Freud, S. (1923). Das Ich und das Es [The Ego and the Id]. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
- Reik, T. (1925). Geständniszwang und Strafbedürfnis [The Compulsion to Confess and the Need for Punishment]. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
- Freud, A. (1936). Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen [The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence]. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
- Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- King, S. (1974). Carrie. Doubleday.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Margaret White?
Margaret White (“Momma”) is a villain from Carrie, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. When her daughter came home bleeding for the first time, Margaret White did not explain what was happening to her.
Why does Margaret White (Momma) become a villain?
Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, and criminological psychoanalysis: she sees sin in her daughter’s body, punishes her for it and ends up holding a knife. Freud described guilt that seeks punishment; she unloads it on her child.
Which criminological theory explains Margaret White?
Margaret White's case is analysed through Psychoanalytic criminology. Criminological psychoanalysis reads crime as the symptom of an unconscious conflict: an overly harsh superego, a guilt that seeks punishment, repressed desires that return in disguise. Margaret White, Carrie’s mother (Stephen King, 1974), is a religious fanatic who sees sexuality as the first sin, punishes in her daughter what she cannot forgive in herself and, on the night of the prom, tries to kill her. Mike Flanagan’s miniseries for Prime Video (2026), starring Samantha Sloyan, has brought her back into the spotlight with a more compassionate portrait.
