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Early on in her book – the latest in what has begun to look like a comprehensive series on the cultural role of mother substitutes – the author says, ‘I have always found it easier to understand a problem by asking myself about its historical antecedents’ (p. 4), including those embedded in mythology. This is apt since throughout the book we are reminded of the significance of our own individual foundational narratives, our histories – actual, mythological, imagined: the stories we hold within – that sustain an abiding sense of antecedent, continuity, connection, and forms our identities. This work explores some of the consequences for those who do not have that privilege, whose links to their ancestry have been in some way severed, as with the ‘illegitimate’, orphaned, abandoned, fostered and adopted child, alongside their families and carers.
To give us a sense of what this absence may feel like, Coles begins by telling us of a middle-aged man she saw during her training as a psychotherapist, who was adopted as a baby in the 1930s and referred to as ‘the man who wasn’t there’ (p. 1), due to his capacity to ‘leave himself behind’ and absorb himself readily into his therapist. For her part, Coles felt he was as ‘sealed off’ as, significantly, were the records of his early life, as if he came from nowhere.
During that same training, she was drawn instinctively to the attachment theory developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, that informs and underpins the thinking and direction of the present work, stating, ‘I have always felt that Bowlby’s attachment theory redressed an imbalance in the delicate demarcation between the conceptualisation of the inner and outer world of psychological theory’ and asserts that, ‘one of the most important insights that attachment theory has given me is the belief that children are not born delinquent or neurotic and their wills do not need to be broken, but they can become dis-functional when the conditions of their upbringing are chao