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Based on her listening as a psychoanalyst to both children and adults, the author questions the new temporal and spatial arrangements between separated parents seeking to preserve their relationships with their children. On the one hand, discourses trivialise the separation by relying on a statistical reality as expressing the frequency of divorce. On the other hand, they seek to diminish the deadly effects on children, by denying the truth of change, whatever spatio-temporal arrangement the new family configuration adopts. The child often gives allegiance to the phantasy of continuity, regardless of the break-up; it then becomes the child’s responsibility for assuming the demise of the family as a project, in the mourning process for the family.