This essay argues that there is a productive tension in the work of Christopher Bollas between knowledge of the mother as prime mover and often cause of mental breakdown and the category of the unconscious as something ultimately unknowable. It suggests that the creative use that Bollas' writing makes of the unconscious progressively undermines the form of analytic certainty underlying the more accusatory relationship to the mother in the earlier work. Finally it proposes that there is a link between our relationship to knowledge and to mothers that still awaits its full theorization.