ABSTRACT

The quintessential adoptee, to quote an adoptee friend of mine, author/ psychologist Betty Jean Lifton (1988), was Oedipus. Had Freud been an adoptee, he would have known that the pivotal issues in Oedipus' complex were abandonment and loss, a need to reconnect with genetic roots and buried, dissociated adoptee rage. Oedipus' search for his past evolved into a fatal quest, in large part, because he was not told the facts of his birth ± that Laius, not Polybus, was his biologic father and Jocasta his birth mother. He had voyaged to Delphi to seek the truth from the Oracle, but was rewarded only with a cryptic message, that if he returned to his own land he would kill his father and marry his mother. The fact that he had been adopted by Polybus after being abandoned by Laius was kept from him, as the truth of their birth is often kept from most adoptees. The consequence was parricide and incest. We are left to consider the possibility that on a deeply unconscious level, Oedipus knew exactly what he was doing when he killed his father and took his mother to the marital bed: he was both taking revenge for having been abandoned as an infant and reconnecting with his genetic past.