Introduction

In the opening chapter, ‘Developing a curiosity about adoption: a psychoanalytic perspective’, John Simmonds describes the distinctive contribution that a psychoanalytic perspective can make to thinking about adoption. Simmonds argues that psychoanalysis has a ‘unique position in the human sciences’, and that a psychoanalytic approach goes to the emotional heart of human relationships with its focus on how feelings and unconscious fantasies shape relationships and interactions. He stresses the explanatory power of psychoanalytic understanding, with its emphasis on underlying meaning rather than merely on external behaviour or ‘symptoms’ and their management or treatment. This is in turn linked to the way in which a psychoanalytic therapeutic approach functions as a medium of change. Simmonds also gives a historical outline of the changing views about, and attitudes to, adoption within a social and professional context and suggests that a psychoanalytic perspective converges with current thinking in the fi eld of adoption. Finally, through a reading of the fairy tale Thumbelina, Simmonds illustrates the emotional drama of curiosity about the past and the predicament of adopted children.