The Emotional Experience of Adoption

Adoption 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. The Emotional Experience of Adoption explains and accounts for the emotional and psychological complexities involved for child, parents and professionals in adoption. It will be of interest and relevance to anyone involved at a personal level in the adoption process or professionals working in the fields of adoption, social work, child mental health, foster care and family support.

Debbie Hindle is Head of the Clinical Training in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations, and also works in the Looked After and Accommodated Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service in Glasgow. Graham Shulman is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist who currently works in NHS Lanarkshire. He was until recently Senior Tutor for the Clinical Training in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy and Organizing Tutor for the Therapeutic Skills with Children and Young People Course at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. He is Joint Editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy.

Part 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