The Fragmented Mother and the Grammar of Desire. How Our Shadows Are Founded.

Three thousand years ago, in a brutally patriarchal world, the Jewish people decreed that one would be Jewish if born of a Jewish mother. It was a tiny crack in the wall of patriarchy, a silent victory that granted woman a fundamental power: to be the gate through which identity is born.
But that foundational power is not innocent; it conceals the most ambiguous force, the origin of all neurosis: the desire and the gaze of the mother (Seminar X).

The rabbis understood something essential: the first things a human being absorbs; language, rhythm, gestures, the gaze, the rituals of cleanliness and social communion, do not come from the father. They come from the mother. She is the first universe, the primordial filter of reality. She decides, consciously or not, what is named and what is silenced, what is shown and what is hidden. In a hostile world, the mother is both refuge and frontier: the one who protects, but also the one who limits.

The father, as Lacan theorized, arrives later. He is the Law, the cut, the rigidity that separates the child from the initial fusion with the mother. The mother is the ground; the father, the signpost showing how to walk upon that ground.

From the perspective of the psyche, defining the mother is easier than defining the woman. The woman can be perceived as an infinity of possible variations: whore, saint, creator, destroyer, body, and absence. The mother, on the other hand, can be reduced to a basic function: to nourish, to teach, to protect. Yet beneath that apparent simplicity lies the most powerful and ambiguous force in human existence.

This sanctity assigned to the mother is not merely theoretical. “A mother’s hands are holy,” mine used to say. I believed it as a dogma for many years. In many cultures, that idealization protects her old age and ensures reciprocity: to care for the one who once cared. It is a symbolic transaction easily mistaken for love. But that sanctity also has a dark side: it turns the mother into a sacred, unquestionable figure, making her desire beyond debate while her gaze becomes law.

And here lies the heart of the matter:

the mother not only teaches us to see, she also teaches us not to see. 

To protect the fragile architecture of the family, many mothers draw thick curtains over reality. Not to filter the sunlight, but to veil what is unbearable. The most damaging of these curtains is the one drawn before an imperfect father. In an act of psychic survival, the mother defends him, justifies him, idealizes him, because to deny the man she chose is, deep down, to deny her own decision and her own judgment. Thus, a perverse logic takes shape: if he fails, it is her fault for not having foreseen, contained, or repaired that failure.

Within this pact of silence, the father is absolved of responsibility and dysfunction becomes eternal. The child no longer sees two figures but a single united front: an untouchable, ghostly father sustained by the omnipotent embrace of a sacred mother who protects him. Both are lies. The Law of the father, which should impose limits, dissolves in this closed circuit. Thus, the sanctity of the mother not only shields the father but also ensures the blindness of the child. The pathological fusion endures, disguised as family harmony.

The weight of the mother is the most powerful influence in a child’s growth. It is worth exploring this further, for the mother’s legacy manifests in two primordial forces, distinct yet intertwined: her desire and her gaze.

The mother’s desire (Seminar IV) is an invisible force, the enigma that founds the subjectivity of the son. It is the question every boy formulates without words: What does she want from me? To be loved is not enough; he must know what place he holds in her desire.

For the boy, that desire is an abyss. If the mother desires too much, he risks becoming the object that satisfies her. If she desires too little or too erratically, he is condemned to search, in every woman he meets, for the echo of that first wanting. His fate in love will depend on whether he succeeds (or fails) to escape the role of completing his mother. The paternal function, when it exists, introduces a limit: “She does not desire you all the time; there is a world beyond her body.”

The mother’s gaze (Seminar XI), on the other hand, has a different quality. For the girl, the story changes. She does not confront the mother’s desire so much as her gaze. From her, she learns how to desire, how to wait, how to offer herself, how to act, to love, and to hate. The mother transmits not only her love but her way of looking at the world, and of looking at herself within it. In that gaze is born the mirror of femininity: the girl sees how the mother is seen, and from there she constructs her own desire.

The boy asks: What does she want from me?

His mission is to decipher the enigma of his own worth. It is not enough to make her happy; he must guess what place he occupies in her fantasy. Am I her prince, her comfort, her masterpiece? His masculinity will be built upon escaping the temptation to be the answer to all her desire.

The girl asks: What does she see in me?

Her challenge is to decipher the code of femininity. She learns to look at herself through her mother’s eyes, internalizing a model: Am I seen as fragile, powerful, or desirable? Her femininity will be forged by accepting or rebelling against that first mirror, which shows not only who she is, but how she must be seen in order to exist in the world.

Both questions, in essence, revolve around "recognition". The boy seeks to define his being through the mother’s desire; the girl defines hers through her gaze. Both are marked for life by this first and decisive grammar of love.

The mother’s gaze fixes, orders, and defines: “You are this way.” It is the force that crystallizes the child’s imaginary identity. Maternal desire, on the other hand, is absent, searching, and propelling: “What will you be for me?” It is the symbolic crack through which language slips in, introducing lack and possibility.

This interplay of forces determines the architecture of the psyche:

• When the gaze dominates and desire is silent, the child becomes a statue; perfect, obedient, immobile. His life is a mold he does not dare to break. 

• When desire overflows and the gaze does not contain it, the child becomes a ghost—restless, formless, condemned to wander in search of being seen. His existence becomes the echo of a question without an answer.

But in the daughter, the equation changes. For her, the maternal gaze not only defines; it is internalized and becomes the first mirror. The girl learns to see herself through her mother’s eyes. She combs her hair in that light, inhabits that reflection. If her mother looks at her with tenderness, the world becomes a place where she can exist in fullness. If she looks at her with judgment or contempt, the world becomes a perpetual tribunal.

As an adult, she will unconsciously seek to replicate that original mirror: in the approval of her lovers, in the gaze of her friends, in her own reflection in the glass. She will repeat the gesture that formed her, trying to reconcile herself with the version of herself her mother taught her to see—and to judge.

Thus, the weight of the maternal gaze falls with decisive asymmetry:

• In the son, it forges an identity in tension with the Law (the paternal).
• In the daughter, it constructs a mirror that can imprison or liberate, but that will always be the foundation of how she relates to the world.

Psychic health ultimately depends on a fragile balance for both: to be seen without being fixed, and to be desired without being devoured.

When the mother is absent: the orphan and the mosaic

What happens when the first universe fades? When there is no mother, but substitutes, the cold protocol of a nurse, the impersonality of an institution, the borrowed caress of a relative? In that void, desire and gaze do not disappear, they explode into fragments. Each caregiver offers a loose piece of the puzzle: a voice, a smell, a routine. The child does not internalize a figure but an archipelago of discontinuous presences.

This mosaic can be either a curse or a genesis. For the orphan, the task is not to remember but to invent a myth of origin. He must build a narrative that answers the primordial question: Was I abandoned because I was unworthy, saved by chance, the mistake of someone, or chosen by a strange destiny? His life becomes, consciously or not, a search for an answer.

In that existential fissure, his fate is decided. If he finds a language; the words of a poem, the line of a drawing, the melody of a song, the fervor of a cause, to name his loss, he performs the ultimate alchemy: he transforms abandonment into symbolic power. The wound becomes a source. If he fails, he remains trapped in an identity limbo, suspended between a thousand foreign gazes and no desire of his own.

The absence of the real mother is therefore an existential command: to create a symbolic mother. The orphan must give birth to her out of his own lack. Marilyn Monroe sculpted hers in celluloid, in the glow of a public persona, a being of light and desire that everyone could gaze upon, to hide the little girl who was never seen. She, like so many others, turned her wound into a vocation: to be desired, as compensation for never having been loved unconditionally.

Because ultimately, orphanhood transcends biography. All of us, somewhere in the depths of our psyche, are orphans of meaning and of pure desire. We are born from the body of a mother, yes, but that is only the first act, animal and contingent. The true birth, the second one, the one that humanizes us, occurs in language. It is the act of the subject who, through separation, through naming their pain and narrating their memory, tears themselves away from the immobile statue and the wandering ghost to finally be able to say: I am