What are the unconscious issues in therapy for adopted children? Is a history of adoption, and the potentially traumatic experiences involved both for the adoptive parents and the adopted child, an obstacle to psychoanalytic approaches to child therapy? Is the framework of the analytical situation, and the regressions and impulses it leads to, something unbearable that means that acting or abruptly breaking off treatment are the only possible means of moving forward? We attempt to examine the specificity of these traumas, which are linked to ruptures in filiation, illustrating our remarks with clinical observations drawn from two cases of treating adopted children, and making reference to the theoretical tools of psychoanalysis. Finally, given the essential questions they raise about abandonment, family history, and the enigma of origins, what can these young adopted patients teach us about our child therapy practices?
- adoption
- filiation
- narrativity
- transference
- counter-transference
- trauma