ABSTRACT
When discontinuity, instead of being symbolic and universal, is replaced by a private discontinuity, the trace of death is replaced by the trace of an inaccessible thing nowhere to be found.
This comes about when the mother only knows a system of all or nothing, and she maintains the child in servitude, or she wounds him. She cannot establish a harmonious relation with him. She needs to see herself in the child’s gaze, instead of reflecting his image back to him. In this all or nothing system, truth holds a special place. Its fate resembles that of all the attempts to establish a relation between the child and a mother alive “to a certain extent”: they fail.
The child will have great difficulty separating from such a parent and establishing with her a relation that acknowledges reality, the reality of a parent who is alive “to a certain extent”. But this separation is always facilitated by the search undertaken with the analyst for the living being who colluded with the living-dead parent and enabled him to come alive. This is an important phase in the analysis: the search for and the discovery of the being who, most often secretly, was able to acquaint the child with the vital pleasure of rhythmic concertation.
