“…and the shadow of the object fell upon the ego and the ego treated the other part like it would a part of it…”. In Freud’s poetic grammar of relations, the first thing considered is not the noun alone, i.e., the shadowed ego; the process of bonding as an enigmatic verb is also included. Is the self capable of living with this identification? Is there mental space available for the ego, or is the ego overwhelmed by identifying with the shadow? However, the question also includes the following: What occurs when the shadow is created by maternal negative hallucination? Addressing the infant-mother relationship, Laplanche posited that the maternal unconscious serves as an enigmatic message to the infant’s unconscious. The infant is unable to represent maternal imprinting, and the message becomes an internal traumatic enigma. Thus, the infant must take action to avoid collapse and survive. Through a clinical presentation, the author argues that psychosis begins when the death instinct binds to primary narcissism to process the enigmatic trauma of the maternal negative hallucination of the infant.