Optimally, the desired and feared mother of early childhood becomes transformed over time into an integrated whole object with whom one can both identify and disidentify. In more troubled dyads, however, this transformation can be severely impeded. Failure to find the “good” mother in childhood makes it difficult for the woman to find the good mother in herself. The lack of fit with an unavailable mother can be experienced as an unfillable need of the child that destroys the good mother. Psychoanalysis offers an opportunity to encounter the disjunction between the experienced reality and that which might be possible if we can move beyond the constrictions of the traumatized subjectivity. In this paper, the author traces the evolution of the maternal object for one woman in middle age, which also entails tracing the evolution of the emergent maternal subject.