Many times, in my life and in others’, I have heard this sentence: “Without my mother, I wouldn’t have made it.” It is a simple, almost banal sentence. And yet it contains so much: survival, love, conflict, dependence, strength. It is not a universal sentence. Not everyone can say it, or has thought it — and the opposite is also true. The relationship to the mother is never straightforward. Just as the unconditional love she sometimes embodies is never simple. I have gone through difficult moments with my daughter, marked by school phobia that tested both of us. There were conflicts, misunderstandings, silences. But also alliances, shared tears, resistance. We have never given up on each other. And we never will. One day she told me: “I wouldn’t have made it without you.” And I, at another moment in my life — during a difficult divorce, when everything could have collapsed — thought: if my mother hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would have become of me. This experience returns. But not for everyone. In the second part of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about the mother as an absolute, intimate, irreducible presence, yet central within the photographic image — a mother with whom he chose to live all his life because he felt good with her. At the same time, psychoanalysis has emphasized the necessity of separation, particularly from the mother, often considered a source of conflict, dependence, or fragility. How can we today revisit these ideas without denying them, but without being ruled by them? Is attachment to the mother harmful? Essential? For whom? When? Under what conditions? Can we reinvent it? Look at it differently?