ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a complicated psychological picture about the wet nurse. Jack London, Lilian Smith and Clarence Oberndorf seem to have been strung between competing emotional connections to their mothers and their wet nurses, and this may have been one of the reasons that their later relationships proved complicated. One interesting upshot of the split that may take place in the infant mind if it has had two mothers is that there is a tendency to idealise the natural mother, as was the case with both Freud and Klein. Freud himself pointed out that there are some feelings that self-analysis cannot reveal, for they are after all in the unconscious mind. The eclipsing of the surrogate mother by the image of the mother offers a good explanation as to why second mother is absent in the psychoanalytic literature.
