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In this wide ranging book, Prophecy Coles approaches the highly contested subject of delegated mothering. Highly contested because it is often impossible not to take one of two opposing and dogmatic views, that of the putatively injured child whose mother is absent from her daily life, or that of the needs and aspirations of the mother. Highly contested also because it is mainly the children of the relatively privileged who receive such substitute care from nannies, women of lesser social and economic status (which of course ignores all those children from poorer families who may be fostered or adopted, or cared for by child-minders). However, many of our patients in private practice will have received extensive delegated mothering, and Coles' book depicts the many ramifications of this in their internal worlds. She also shows the limitations of psychoanalytic theory and practice in any adequate recognition of the non-biological care taker or substitute parent, something which has a wider relevance.
Freud famously said of his nurse: ‘… The prime originator [of my troubles] was a woman, ugly, elderly but clever…’. He followed this a few paragraphs later with: ‘(I)f I succeed in resolving my own hysteria, I shall be grateful to the old woman who provided me at such an early age with the means for living and going on living. As you see my old liking for her is breaking through again’ (Freud, 1897, pp. 261-2). However, in the same sequence of letters to Fliess, and after recounting the degree of his emotional disturbance at his nurse's sudden dismissal, Freud rapidly disavowed the psychic importance of such figures, in his formulation of the Oedipus complex and its restriction to the biological parents only. In such ways (and there are many other instances, as I argue in Ryan (2017)) was the significance of the working-class nurse eclipsed by the often idealized and more distant mother. There is now a considerable secondary literature on how Freud's nurse continued to ha