Left Without a Word: Learning Rhythms, Rhymes, and Reasons in Adoption

Abstract

Traditional psychoanalytic understandings of the social, cognitive, and emotional issues in adoption are in need of updating. A narrative approach to adoption can open exploration of this topic along new lines—making room for curiosity in adoptees, adoptive families, and those called on to assist them. If we theorize that the central dilemma for the adopted child is the creation of a coherent family narrative, that neurocognitive differences in the child contribute to the cognitive challenges of mourning and internalization, and that curiosity inhibition and separation problems are interrelated, we may better account for the difficulties with separating and managing complexity evident in the diminished socioemotional functioning of many adoptees. These difficulties, predictably, result in developmental delays but not impaired outcomes. Thus, for a period of time both family and adoptee must find ways to accommodate unexpected influences—from within and without. The adoptive father's role may be crucial for improving social judgment and attenuating loss aversion in adoptees; he also provides a contextualizing perspective for the family. Clinicians can best help adoptees and their families by recognizing the need for more complex narratives that both make sense of multiple unique developmental trajectories and provide new normative paradigms that assist with tolerating the contradictions and ambiguities that arise while the adoptee matures.