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As a psychic quality in men and women that emanates from their experience of their mother's lived experience, the maternal acts in synergy with the paternal, just as sensory experience exists in synergy with the symbolic. Abensour and Kristeva bring out the maternal through a play of light and shadow. In Kristeva's work, the maternal refers to a drive economy that transforms the sexual drives into the maternal?: reliance. For Abensour, the maternal evokes primal fantasies and the primal scene. Starting from the shadow of primal repression present in both authors' work, a discussion is put forward concerning maternal language, which has its origins in both the primal scene and the double?: maternal language as a connecting space.