Harding is making a precise and uncomfortable distinction. The actual woman who raised you — fallible, particular, sometimes wrong, sometimes simply tired — is not what holds you. What holds you is an image: a figure of absolute authority assembled in infancy, when your mother genuinely was the difference between survival and dissolution. That figure never had to update. It was complete before language arrived, before any capacity for evaluation existed, and so it sits beneath critique, beneath experience, beneath every revision the adult mind would like to make.

This is why daughters who know their mothers are wrong still cannot quite act against them — or more precisely, cannot act outside a perimeter that the imago set long before any conscious relationship existed. The conviction is not irrational; it was rational once, when the infant's helplessness was total. The soul preserves what kept it alive. The trouble is that the preservation continues past the conditions that made it necessary, and the woman who could live her own life finds that life hemmed by an authority that has no face left to argue with — only a weight, a hesitation, a sense that something vast will disapprove.