The image of the semiotic murder of the mother is a metaphor for the odyssey of the human infant as s/he moves from tactile atonement with mother and the 'language' of normal auto-sensuality, and enters into the signifying and symbolic universe of discourse. Freud's emphasis on the father-son relationship as the key experience around which oedipal development takes place, and Lacan's dichotomization of the capacity to use symbols and language from maternal capacities, have seriously deleted women and mother from the central stage of psychoanalytic theory. Melanie Klein's notions of the pre-oedipal played an important part in re-integrating maternal capacities into psychoanalytic theory. Post-Lacanians, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have also resuscitated maternal capacities, proposing that the discourse of mother and child has been exiled from the symbolic order. The notion of the 'black hole' as a psychic structure of emptiness and meaninglessness is a major factor in understanding the repression of the maternal body and the infant's experience with her.