Description
Book SynopsisAdoption is an extremely complex and emotionally demanding process for all those involved. This book explores the emotional experience of adoption from a psychoanalytic perspective, and demonstrates how psychoanalytic understanding and treatment can contribute to thinking about and working with adopted children and their families.
Drawing on psychoanalytic, attachment and child development theory, and detailed in-depth clinical case discussion, The Emotional Experience of Adoption explores issues such as:
- the emotional experience of children placed for adoption, and how this both shapes and is shaped by unconscious processes in the child's inner world
- how psychoanalytic child psychotherapy can help as a distinctive source of understanding and as a treatment for children who are either in the process of being adopted or already adopted
- how such understanding can inform planning and decision making amongst professionals and carers.
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Trade Review'An interesting, informative and enjoyable read, the volume conveys core psychoanalytic ideas relevant to adoption and insights into therapeutic processes in a very vivid and accessible fashion.' - Malcolm Hill, Glasgow School of Social Work, UK
'Focusing on the trauma experienced by most adopted children prior to being taken into care, this book conveys the damage these children have sustained and the impact of this on their new family and the professionals involved. Psychoanalytic ideas both help understanding and provide a means of amelioration by offering treatment possibilities and a consultation framework. An accessible but painful book to read.' - Judith Trowell, West Midlands Care Service Improvement Partnership and University of Worcester, UK
Table of ContentsPart I: Setting the Scene 1. Developing a curiosity about adoption: a psychoanalytic perspective 2. Why is early development important? 3. Understanding an adopted child: a child psychotherapist’s perspective Part II: Unconscious Dynamics in Systems and Networks 4. Multiple families in mind 5. Enabling effective support: secondary traumatic stress and adoptive families 6. The network around adoption: the forever family and the ghosts of the dispossessed Part III: Primitive States of Mind and their Impact on Relationships 7. The mermaid: moving towards reality after trauma 8. On being dropped and picked up: the plight of some late-adopted children Part IV: Belonging and Becoming: Transitions 9. Playing out, not acting out: the development of the capacity to play in the therapy of children who are ‘in transition’ from fostering to adoption 10. Just pretend: the importance of symbolic play and its interpretation in intensive psychotherapy with a four year-old adopted boy 11. The longing to become a family: support for the parental couple 12. Shared reflections on parallel collaborative work with adoptive families. Part V: Being Part of a Family: Oedipal Issues 13. Loss, recovery and adoption: a child’s perspective 14. Oedipal difficulties in the triangular relationship between the parents, the child and the child psychotherapist Part VI: Adoption and Adolescence: The Question of Identity 15. Deprivation and development: the predicament of an adopted adolescent in the search for identity 16. Idealisation and overvalued ideas Further Reflections 17. A cautionary tale of adoption: fictional lives and living fictions Final Thoughts
