Crucial to the intersection of trust with emergent social capabilities on the part of the infant, therefore, is absence. Here, at the heart of the psychological development of trust, we rediscover the problematic of time-space distanciation. For a fundamental feature of the early formation of trust is trust in the caretaker’s return. A feeling of the reliability, yet independent experience, of others—central to a sense of continuity of self-identity—is predicated upon the recognition that the absence of the mother does not represent a withdrawal of love. Trust thus brackets distance in time and space and so blocks off existential anxieties which, if they were allowed to concretise, might become a source of continuing emotional and behavioural anguish throughout life.

XREF: Connects to object relations theory (Winnicott) and the 'good enough mother' concept, and to developmental psychology on attachment and object permanence.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 237