Mother

I’ve read this song is more fully elucidated in the film. My take is Waters is combing three themes: the Oedipal Complex, freedom to have sex without shame and Wartime. The Oedipal Complex is defined by the failure of the boy to separate from mum and identify with dad. The movie represents a boy being raised by a mother whose husband was killed in WW2. Having experienced the loss, the mother becomes viciously overprotective, which is internalized by the child and later felt by the adult to be a “wall,” which stifles the man from living a full and vital life, characterized by not taking the risks necessary to make it so (due to the stuck-ness in the Oedipal stage or what Freud would call “neurosis”). The boy is scared due to dad’s death, and the first stanza illustrates an existential choice: should I or should I not build the wall you are telling me I must (e.g. character armor, defense mechanisms, survival strategies). The author wonders if he should conquer his fear and achieve his potential, but the anxiety process leading to the avoidance strategy is clear: why should I run for president when the government is corrupt? Existential despair results. Life must be meaningless in a world defined by uncertainty and the unknown. With Gilmore’s chorus we see the awful result of how mum’s projected abandonment fears have on the adult (Pink). Like a spider web with mother as the fly, the child is stuck, trapped, and because of the wall they’ve built together, your nightmares (terror of intimacy due to enmeshment with mom), her fears (vulnerability with another is inherently dangerous), and her selfish and pathological need to sabotage independence to avoid her dealing with her grief and loneliness (also internalized). Family therapists refer to this phenomenon as emotional incest. The song continues to ask whether the boy (teen) having sex is permissible. The next chorus indicates mama, still as stuck as the boy when the enmeshment began, will see this as a betrayal and unleash shame as a way to manipulate the adult to stay loyal to her, and her only.
In the end, Pink realizes the pathology (the why being too high). There is a inchoate sadness in that last C chord; the despair of “too little too late.”
A really brilliant and easily my favorite Floyd song. I think this song also illustrates how genius often works, seemingly simple line when unpacked reveal timeless truths. Another good example is Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and “I Shall be Released.”