The importance of the mother's role in general is acknowledged in psychoanalytic theory as well as the significance of motherhood to the mother herself - yet all revert to the consensus that the mode of talking about the mother is tantamount to adopting the child's viewpoint. The mother as such is denied existence as an autonomous individual. This is the outcome of the massive use of denial, repression and splitting due to the universal debt to the mother (the lifegiver) & the problematic oxymoron of viewing the mother as a sexual object as well as been a protecting comforting figure.

The second part of the paper offers a theoretical paradigm that enables us to describe the development of the mother as subject. I believe that if we join this paradigm to mothers’ own reports of their personal experience, a shift in both the theoretical and clinical status of motherhood can be achieved.