The unfinished Rondanini Pieta is the last and also the most tragic of Michelangelo's great Pietas. The paper discusses the artist's infantile neurosis, in particular the loss of his mother in early infancy and his abandonment by his parents. The influence of these conflicts on his character and creativity is investigated as well as his lifelong depression and his confusion about the role of the parental imagos and about his self-image. Both of these are traced to his earliest infantile traumata. The sublimated effort to deal with them resulted in the three major versions of the Rondanini Pieta. These considerations seem to prove that six days before his death, close to his 89th birthday, the artist was still unconsciously grappling with the unresolved problem as to whether the maternal breast was life-giving and union with it represented eternal bliss or whether fusion with it meant annihilition of the son.