The Emotional Experience of Adoption: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

by Hindle; Debbie

• ISBN13: 9780415372763
• ISBN10: 0415372763
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-06-21
• 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

Setting the Scene

Developing a curiosity about adoption: a psychoanalytic perspective

Why is early development important?

Understanding an adopted child: a child psychotherapist's perspective

Unconscious Dynamics in Systems and Networks

Multiple families in mind

Enabling effective support: secondary traumatic stress and adoptive families

The network around adoption: the forever family and the ghosts of the dispossessed

Primitive States of Mind and their Impact on Relationships

The mermaid: moving towards reality after trauma

Case on being dropped and picked up: the plight of some late-adopted children

Belonging and Becoming: Transitions

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

Just pretend: the importance of symbolic play and its interpretation in intensive psychotherapy with a four year-old adopted boy

The longing to become a family: support for the parental couple

Shared reflections on parallel collaborative work with adoptive families

Being Part of a Family: Oedipal Issues

Loss, recovery and adoption: a child's perspective

Oedipal difficulties in the triangular relationship between the parents, the child and the child psychotherapist

Deprivation and development: the predicament of an adopted adolescent in the search for identity

Idealisation and overvalued ideas

Further Reflections

A cautionary tale of adoption: fictional lives and living fictions

Final Thoughts

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.