In Telemachiad episodes of James Joyce's Ulysses we first encounter in microcosm Stephen Dedalus's search for identity - a search which will color entire narrative. At heart of is Stephen's relationship with his mother, both real mother who nurtured him and is now dead, and an imagined symbolic mother who is a product of Stephen's fearful and anxious consciousness. Stephen desperately needs these two mothers to define him; his self hood derives simultaneously from unconditional affirmation which his real mother gave him and from his active struggle against all that imagined mother stands for - an all-encompassing fertility linked with nature which signals death to Stephen. What these two mothers have in common is their lack of subjecthood in Stephen's perception - that is, real mother is forbidden to be anything more than what Stephen wishes her to be, and imagined mother is nothing more than an object of Stephen's fears. Only by silencing and objectifying mother can Stephen satisfy his infantile craving for oneness and his adult need for autonomy. This allows Stephen to enter established paternal order which demands repression and domination of mother. But Stephen remains haunted by memory of his mother's self hood, represented by her death and revelation its graphic and grotesque memory forces on him. He is torn between need for mother and desire to imitate father; however, nagging reminders of mother's subjecthood revealed in Telemachiad continually undercut Stephen's attempts to participate wholly in paternal order. Consequently, Ulysses as a whole illustrates tension between law of father and self hood of mother, and this tension will by end point toward potential for a new sense of self. Stephen's need for his mother is established throughout A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man and continues into Ulysses. In A Portrait Stephen sees himself as weak and timid in childhood, longing for his mother to protect him from what Suzette Henke calls the brutal male environment of school life (84).(1) The affinity between weak child and nurturing mother is echoed in appearance of Cyril Sargent in Nestor episode of Ulysses, a boy in whom Stephen recognizes his childhood self: Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me (2.168-69). Even Stephen's rebellion at end of A Portrait is not so much to break away from his mother as to test her nurturing powers and push her love to limits. As Richard Ellmann points out, when [Stephen] rebels he hastens to let [others] know of his rebellion so that he can measure their response to it (292). This need for a response indicates that Stephen's conflict goes beyond what Jeanne McKnight refers to as the infantile conflict between desire to remain an undifferentiated part of mother and developmental wish to be separate and free (422). His conflict stems from this need for differentiation; however, centers not so much on his own struggle between nurturance and autonomy as on his perception of his mother, another basic element of differentiation. In psychoanalytic terms, successful differentiation relies not only on a perception of subjective otherness (simply recognizing physical difference) but also on what Nancy Chodorow calls the ability to experience and perceive object/other (the mother) in aspects apart from its sole relation to ability to gratify infant's/subject's needs and wants; [it involves] seeing object as separate from self and from self's This process, to Chodorow, means according mother her own selfhood (7). But because perception of mother is grounded in pre-Oedipal infantile sensations, this process is often resisted and experienced only conflictually and partially. Throughout life, perceptions of mother fluctuate between perceiving her particularity and self hood and perceiving her as a narcissistic extension, a not-separate other whose sole reason for existence is to gratify one's own wants and needs. …