Nancy Verrier

Nancy Verrier is an American psychotherapist, author, lecturer and adoptive parent. She is perhaps best known for work in the areas of adoption and adoption reform, and has published two widely regarded books concerning the psychopathology of adoption. They are The Primal Wound (1993), subtitled Understanding the Adopted Child, and Coming Home to Self.

The core premise of the Primal Wound theory is that a child separated from its mother at the beginning of life, when still in the primal relationship to her, experiences what she calls the primal wound. This wound, occurring before the child has begun to separate his own identity from that of the mother, is experienced not only as a loss of the mother, but as a loss of the Self, that core-being of oneself which is the center of goodness and wholeness. The child may be left with a sense that part of oneself has disappeared, a feeling of incompleteness, a lack of wholeness. In addition to the genealogical sense of being cut off from one's roots, this incompleteness is often experienced in a physical sense of bodily incompleteness, a hurt from something missing.

Her book, The Primal Wound, is now also used by those born of assisted conception.