ABSTRACT
The difficulty in finding the 'impression' of the wet nurse may be linked to a traumatic effect on the child if the nurse suddenly disappears, as in the case of Freud, and could lead to the memory being blocked out. A distance can be created between parents and their children if the nanny becomes the most important person in the child's life. In the memoirs of the actress Anna Massey, she emphatically states, 'Gertrude Burbidge' was the mainstay of my life. The nanny, and it needs to be remembered that she is unmarried, may bring her own anxieties about sexuality and reproduction. The nanny, like the wet nurse who preceded her, remains a shadowy presence in psychological theory, and it is hard not to conclude that her absence has been the result of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century idealisation of the nuclear family and the wish to ignore the fact that many parents have preferred to delegate their mothering to another.
