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The author of this article, who is a couple therapist, started out in this study from a work by Annick Houel who, in L’adultère au féminin et son roman, writes that the heroines of novels strike up a passionate relationship with their lover under the protection of their husband, again playing out the primary relationship with the mother. Looking at clinical cases of people coming in for consultations, the meaning of adultery in how the couple becomes organised is dissected, whether for a hetero- or homo- sexual relation, for the couple and/or for the liaison. Each case reveals something of the concealed substructure of the spouses’ relationship, groundings that the liaison has sometimes established or reveals in the couple’s relationship, and that at some time in life return, requiring further elaboration.