“There’s No Such Thing as a Whole Story”: The Psychosocial Implications of Adopted Women’s Experiences of Finding Their Biological Fathers in Adulthood

Abstract

This research takes as its focus the case study of a female adoptee’s experience of meeting her biological father in an attempt to dissect the ways in which we think about the gendered dynamics of adoptive kinship and subjectivity through an oedipal lens. For the most part, “reunion” discourses draw attention to the “birth mother” as a figure of wholeness, symbolizing traumatic separation and the desire to return to origins. Adoptee subjectivity is then understood through the lens of the “primal wound,” a metatheoretical model that positions adoptees as victims and “reunion” as a pathway to “healing.” Opening a space for theorizing the role of the discursively neglected biological father, this research exposes the enigmatic dimensions of this figure and how telling the relational story of “reconciliation” might be used to complicate wider categories of subjective completeness, belonging, and truth. The prevailing origins narrative and interconnected notion of “reunion” as event are dismantled, revealing just how varied and complex female adoptees’ experiences of finding their biological fathers in adulthood can be.

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Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Hughes

Elizabeth Hughes, Ph.D., started researching adoption reunion for her master’s dissertation in Counselling and Psychotherapy at University of East London in 2010. She is currently developing this work in her role as Associate Research Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2014 under the supervision of Stephen Frosh.