Trauma of Separation, by Michael J. Burlingham, New York Times, December 12, 1994
To the Editor:

With respect to the fate of children of young single mothers on welfare, legislators should consider the Hampstead Nurseries in London. Between 1940 and 1945, 80 children between 10 days and 10 years old, made homeless by reasons of war, were placed in three residential nurseries supervised by the child psychologist Anna Freud, and by my grandmother, Dorothy Burlingham.

After 56 months of continuous observation, the first and foremost conclusion the women reached was that, for a child, the horror of war pales besides the horror of separation from mother. They discovered that the war itself was only a precipitating and aggravating agent. From this perspective, enlightened day care would be preferable to orphanages.

In most countries outside of the North American continent, adoptees have access when they reach the age of majority. In Holland they recently lowered the age from 14 to 12 for adoptees to get their original birth certificate because they know the importance of having that knowledge during adolescence. In Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand the governments have gone to great lengths to stop the separation of mother and child because they know the devastation that event has on the lives of both.

In 1943, Florence Clothier (The Psychology of the Adopted Child) "The child separated from his/her mother at or soon after birth misses the mutual and deeply satisfying mother-child relationship, the roots of which lie in that deep area of personality where the physiological and psychological are merged. This is part of a biological sequence... It is doubtful whether the relationship of the child to its post-partum mother, in its subtler effects, can be replaced by even the best of substitute mothers." "The infant is traumatized by its separation from the mother at birth"

DW Winnicott in 1965 said there is no such thing as an infant, only the mother-infant system. (The theory of Parent-Infant Relationship)

"It is dreadful to not know whether something is fact, or mystery or fantasy."
John Bowlby in 1973 documented the anxiety infants feel when separated from their mothers (Separation: Anxiety and Anger)

Erik Erikson believes that not knowing who your genetic relatives are causes a lack of what he called actuality, not feeling connected to people and events in a real way.

Nancy Verrier in the Primal Wound, 1993, states that the separation of mother and child causes psychic shock and should never occur unless there is no other choice. The wound makes the infant feel that part of itself has disappeared, leaving it with a feeling of incompleteness or lack of wholeness.