ABSTRACT
An adopted boy who had been badly abused in his original home had two contrasting memories which emerged in a therapy session: a fl owered stair carpet and a frightening shape at the bottom which he thought had something to do with hanging coats. (He had in fact been found, nearly naked, shut in a cupboard under the stairs.) Whatever the reality on which these images had been based however, I could simply take it up in his therapy in terms of fragments – good and bad, safe and unsafe – which he was used to carrying around, trying to piece them together. We all have these Proustian images which seem to exist in an area between waking and dreaming, but for the late-adopted child with perhaps little idea of parents inside his mind to help him think about his story, they can become persecuting and persistent. The non-adopted child in an ordinarily good enough home with biological parents has to struggle to unite the opposing ideas of loving and hating the same people. The process involves illusion and disillusion on the long road towards an adequate appreciation of reality. For the adopted child, this task may be severely compromised by the facts of early history and the fantasies constructed around them. These may remain dormant and then erupt with great force when the child is fi nally placed for adoption, and begins to have a sense of a secure base from which to express a rightful grievance. Are the birth parents bad? Is the child a bad child? Have the adoptive parents stolen the child from
an idealised happier situation? It is sobering to note how the most abusive early situations can turn in the child’s mind to something loved and lost in the face of the inevitable diffi culties of fi tting into a new family. As another child said to me, ‘I just don’t believe they did those things to me.’ This was a child who had received substantial ‘damages’ through the courts for the treatment which he had received at the hands of his birth parents. The often very violent repudiation of knowledge may then re-enter the mind in a similarly violent way, causing further splits because of the diffi culty of integrating facts and fantasies. This process is of course vital, in order that the child may achieve a realistic and inevitably mixed picture, both of the birth family and the adoptive family. Confl icts may either persist as an inhibiting factor towards settling down, or they may re-emerge at times of stress, as in the case I describe here, where the stress of a new baby caused a resurgence of ancient griefs and grievances.
