  In this talk we present a description of nuclear binding in a chiral approach
based on the existence of a chiral invariant scalar field associated with the
generation of the masses through spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. We
discuss the emergence of such a field on the example of the NJL model. We also
incorporate the effect of confinement at the level of the nucleon substructure
to stabilize nuclear matter. In a particular quark-diquark model we illustrate
the simutaneous influences of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and
confinement on the nucleon mass and on the nuclear matter description.
