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Freud could not fully develop the metapsychological issues linked to the theme of motherly seduction, as his perception of motherly care presupposed, as a matter of fact, that the mother is she “who could not be ambivalent toward her first son.” She could only be destructive (and a seductress) through a phantasy. Conrad Stein’s Les Erinyes d’une mère revisits this a priori interpretation by Freud, and goes beyond it to formalize a conceptualization of hatred as one of the main components of melancholia.