Magritte paints thought rather than what the eye sees, or else it is a matter of the eye that “sees” in the dream. For him, the gaze is an inner gaze constantly superimposing two realities, that of reflected psychic reality and that of non-reflected material reality. The author studies the relations between the themes of Magritte’s paintings and the absence of reflection in the one-way gaze of a depressed mother who, after several attempts, committed suicide when he was 14 years old. The possibility of her disappearance became a mirage of the present in the past, as Bergson would say, to which his paintings bear witness, “surrealizing” fantasy in external reality. The art of naming his canvases, plunging the spectator into a state of perplexity that requires him to exercise an excessive degree of imagination, is interpreted as being linked to the place of a father with a strong sense of humour, thereby making it possible to “create a third object” of the attraction that the work has for the artist, which otherwise would be in danger of disappearing like in the one-way mirror of a suicidal mother.