The Emotional Experience of Adoption: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

by Hindle; Debbie

• ISBN13: 9780415372756
• ISBN10: 0415372755
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Demonstrating how psychoanalytic understanding and treatment can contribute to thinking about and working with adopted children and their families, this book illustrates how psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help both as a treatment and as a distinctive source of understanding for children who are either in the process of being adopted or already adopted. The book explores the nature and experiences of children placed for adoption, and how these shape and are shaped by unconscious processes in the child?s inner world.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Setting the scene	p. 23
Introduction	p. 24
Developing a curiosity about adoption: a psychoanalytic perspective	p. 27
Why is early development important?	p. 42
Understanding an adopted child: a child psychotherapist's perspective	p. 57
Unconscious dynamics in systems and networks	p. 71
Introduction	p. 72
Multiple families in mind	p. 77
Enabling effective support: secondary traumatic stress and adoptive families	p. 90
The network around adoption: the forever family and the ghosts of the dispossessed	p. 99
Primitive states of mind and their impact on relationships	p. 115
Introduction	p. 116
The mermaid: moving towards reality after trauma	p. 121
On being dropped and picked up: the plight of some late-adopted children	p. 136
Belonging and becoming: transitions	p. 149
Introduction
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	p. 155
Just pretend: the importance of symbolic play and its interpretation in intensive psychotherapy with a four-year-old adopted boy	p. 168
The longing to become a family: support for the parental couple	p. 177
Shared reflections on parallel collaborative work with adoptive families	p. 185
Being part of a family: oedipal issues	p. 193
Introduction	p. 194
Loss, recovery and adoption: a child's perspective	p. 197
Oedipal difficulties in the triangular relationship between the parents, the child and the child psychotherapist	p. 209
Adoption and adolescence: the question of identity	p. 221
Introduction	p. 222
Deprivation and development: the predicament of an adopted adolescent in the search for identity	p. 225
Adoption and adolescence: idealisation and overvalued ideas	p. 237
Further reflections	p. 251
A cautionary tale of adoption: fictional lives and living fictions	p. 253
Final thoughts	p. 264
Index	p. 272
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