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Mom is one of the second generations of psychoanalysts who were instrumental in the development of psychoanalysis in Argentina. He was a close disciple of E. Pichon-Rivière. The most original and significant contribution that Mom made to psychoanalysis was his work on the pathology of phobias. He studied the relationship established by the phobic patient both with the phobic object and what he called the “accompanying” object in certain phobias. He considered the phobic object as being actively sought out by the subject as opposed to being avoided, the latter being the traditionally held view. This active search enables the phobic patient to associate anxiety with an object (an anxiety linked to the phobogenic object), protecting them from a potential catastrophic situation arising from the dread of experiencing fragmentation anxiety, which derives from the fear of helplessness. Initially, the subject who constructs a phobia looks for an object that he/she does not have, and that he/she lacks. This object is vital for the structuring of the subject’s mental order in that it is the very existence of this object that sets a dividing line, a limit, between the self and a negative image of an internal object. Thus, the subject can avoid the terrifying undifferentiation between the self and the internal object, which is the source of the subject’s feeling of falling into madness. By creating a feared object, the subject has an object that can be differentiated from the self and that is a “non-me”, allowing the subject to have a separate identity: this is the essential function of the phobia.