Healing the Mother Wound: Books to Guide Your Inner Journey

The mother–child relationship is our first psychic landscape — the place where our sense of self, safety, and internal coherence are created.

When the mother is absent, inconsistent, overwhelmed, or unable to attune, the child adapts in ways that can shape an entire lifetime: in relationships, in self-worth, in the capacity to feel, and in the ability to trust.

It is important to define what is meant by the “mother wound” within this context and in this space. In depth psychology, when we speak about the “mother,” we are not evaluating the woman herself. We are examining the maternal function—the psychic capacities of attunement, containment, soothing, and recognition that shape a child’s inner world. A mother may be loving and devoted, yet still unable to provide certain functions because of her own history, trauma, or emotional limitations.

Jungian & Depth Psychology on the Mother Wound

  • The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect
    Jasmin Lee Cori

  • The Parental Image: Its Injury and Reconstruction
    Mary Esther Harding

  • The Mother (Studies in Jungian Psychology #34)
    Sibylle Birkhäuser-Oeri

  • The Pregnant Virgin
    Marion Woodman

  • The Drama of the Gifted Child
    Alice Miller

  • Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers
    Karyl McBride

  • Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance
    Kelly McDaniel

  • Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power
    Bethany Webster

Intergenerational Trauma & Somatic Lineage Work

  • Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma
    Dr. Mariel Buqué

  • It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
    Mark Wolynn

  • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
    Resmaa Menakem

Psychoanalytic Lens on Mothers, Separation & Female Subjectivity

  • Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence: From the Traumatic to Faith and Trust
    Ofrit Shapira-Berman

  • Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual
    Louise Kaplan

  • Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity
    Jane Van Buren

  • The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
    Nancy Chodorow

  • Psychoanalysis and Feminism
    Juliet Mitchell

  • The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism
    Marianne Hirsch

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The Orphan Wound Reading List