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The Shadow of the Second Mother asks a fundamental question which has been almost completely ignored by sociologists, social historians, and, until quite recently, also by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, and child psychologists: what has been the role of the wet nurse in child development? For Coles in many respects the nurse/nanny is the modern equivalent.
Coles, an experienced psychotherapist, admits, that despite having had five nannies during the first five years of her life during the Second World War, she had no recollection of them; nor had she been interested in the clinical implications of having had a nanny during some thirty years of work as a psychotherapist. By reflecting on this “obliteration” and opening her eyes to her own lack of recall Coles has written a ground-breaking book that reveals a glaring lacuna in theorising about childhood development (almost always predicated on an assumed mother-infant dyad that those like myself who have had nannies find impossible to swallow). She also reveals grave limitations to the conventional approaches to much child rearing in wider Western society, including the present day. At the same time she demonstrates that whatever remains of the Freudian