A place within the heart: finding a home with parental objects

Abstract

For adopted and Looked After children with compromised early experiences, there can be troubling phantasies and anxieties associated with parental objects. These internal object relations can seriously restrict the development of secure intimate relationships with new parental figures. Adoptive parents and foster carers bear the brunt of the associated difficulties. Clinical work with the child, parents/carers, family, or network, may help processes of containment, differentiation, working through, mourning, and integration. This paper is based on thinking derived from clinical work with children who are adopted or Looked After, and with adoptive parental couples, carers, and networks. The primary focus is on how the child needs to find a ‘psychic home’ in the minds of others for their damaged internal parental objects, and the emotional capacities required in adoptive parents to provide this. I describe some of the complexities for adoptive parents and others in providing what is needed to enable the child to experience their internal parental objects in a fuller way. This process can allow the child to introject, identify with, and re-imagine their internal parental objects, and through this develop a more realistic relationship to their adoptive parents and to their birth parents. It promotes trust, freedom, and emotional depth in the relationship with parental figures.

Keywords:

• adoption
• adoptive couples
• psychic home
• parental objects
• projective identification
• looked after children

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Margaret Rustin for her clinical supervision and her comments on this paper, and to Lydia-Hartland Rowe for her enduring support and advice.

Notes

1. Although I have referred to parental couples, I do not intend to exclude single parents. The ideas are based on the notion that within each individual there is an Oedipal situation, and ideas, feelings and phantasies pertaining to a parental couple, and both masculine and feminine aspects to the personality. Therapeutic work with a single adoptive parent would take account of this internal reality and the child’s inevitable enquires about couplings.

2. All clinical material and patient details have been disguised, and I have composited elements from a number of cases, from work in various clinical contexts, over many years. I have sought to protect patient privacy and yet retain the integrity of the experiences being described. One casualty of negotiating these different interests is that some of the case material is not as detailed as I would wish in order to fully show the clinical processes which gave rise to the ideas outlined (Gabbard, 2000).