Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence: From the Traumatic to Faith and Trust, by Ofrit Shapira-Berman,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022,  156 pp.

Philosophers, anthropologists, and storytellers have long demonstrated an awareness of the profound impact that mothers have on their offspring's psychological development and well-being. When psychoanalysis arrived at the turn of the 20^th century, Freud contributed a refinement of this knowledge with his exquisite theories of the mind - its conscious and unconscious structural design, conflict and defense, and especially the relevance of childhood psychosexual development. However, Freud's exclusive reliance on male psychology and his focus on the Oedipus left the task of developing a universal theory of the mind to later theorists. In the mid to late 20^th century, theories addressing female development, the infant-mother dyad, development through the life span, and the relevance of intersubjective experience, emerged. And, not surprisingly, psychoanalysts turned their attention toward understanding the complex, psychological reverberations that occur when our mothers go missing - literally and/or figuratively. The body of work that addressed the psychological impact of maternal absence grew during this time (Bowlby, 1958, 1969; Furman, 1981; Silverman & Worden, 1993). By the end of the 20^th century, after two world wars and the women's movement, the field's focus shifted toward understanding trauma. With that shift, psychoanalysis moved into the 21^st century with a renewed interest in the traumatic impact of maternal absence.

Ofrit Shapira-Berman's book, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence: From the Traumatic to Faith and Trust, offers a modern day understanding of the painful and numbing psychological impact that maternal absence has on the evolving child's capacity to become an emotionally alive and comfortably related adult. Following in the tradition of Alice Miller's Prisoners of Childhood: Drama of the Gifted Child (1981), Shapira-Berman captures the damaging influence that not having a consistent and reliable, Winnicottian ‘good enough’ mother in childhood h