“Why Didn't They Keep Me?”: The Search For Belonging in the Analysis of a Four Year Old Adopted Child

Abstract

The purpose of this clinical article is to discuss aspects of the analysis of a child whose adoption functioned as organizer of her personality. Her fantasy life, defensive organization, sense of self and other, and object relations were all organized around a personal mythology surrounding her adoption. These organizing myths took various forms that emerged in the course of the analysis. Her adoptive parents also created a mythology that had a critical impact on the child's development and on their development as parents. The analytic work demonstrates how these organizing mythologies governed the parent–child relationship and how the collision of their mythologies led to a breakdown in the child's development and in parental functioning. In the course of the analysis, the child developed the capacity to grieve and to react to loss in an organized way as progressive development was restored and she was able to feel valued and loved. Her parents began to grieve the dual loss of not having biological children or a perfect adoption, and to develop more motherly and fatherly feelings for their child.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Barbara Rocah and Edward Kaufman for their comments on this article. A version of this article was presented at the Canadian Group of Psychoanalysts for Children and Adolescents, Montreal, September 17, 2011 with discussion by Dr. Joyce Canfield.

This paper was presented to Canadian Group of Psychoanalysts for Children and Adolescents, Montreal.