Adoption and psychological suffering

Abstract

We find sometimes states of intense psychological suffering in families linked by adoption. For its initial condition of helplessness, the child becomes more sensitive to environmental constraints to which he/she is subjected. For adoptive parents, there is the challenge of raising a child who was not born of them and has a previous history of which they did not participate. Some characteristics inherent in the adoption process require more effort to adapt than in families united by biological link: the child’s experience of separation in relation to the mother with genetic link, the marks of abandonment and poor initial care, the sterility of the adoptive parents and their anguish and expectations for the child. These themes are examined from the analysis of a clinical case in which the intricate family dynamics are intertwined with troubles related to the adoption panorama, promoting psychological suffering in all family members. Michel, a boy of five years old, could not separate from the foster mother and couldn´t have his own life. A series of drawings shows his psychical outlook and his fantasies of being responsible for the disappearance of the birth mother and for the adoptive parent´s diseases.