This article explores how Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) mounts a challenge to traditional psychoanalytic discourse around communication, language, and analysis: places in which language and subjectivity are unpicked and restitched. It considers how Baraitser intersects with Lacan's later work on these issues and how her writings on the affects of motherhood can create “reflective spaces” in which to explore the self-in-speech. Baraitser's shifting focus from space to encounter helps to counter and sidestep the debilitating rhetoric of the mother in psychoanalytic discourse. Baraitser's maternal encounter brings about a new approach to subjectivity within psychoanalytic discourse, reworking the relationship of this (maternal) position to the unsymbolisable and ambivalence, and reinscribes it as a privileged model for social, cultural, critical, and analytic encounters.