Introduction

Adoption is profoundly complex. It encompasses issues of identity and sense of self, the question of origins and the sense of belonging, the experience of loss and the capacity to form new attachment relationships. These are in turn intimately linked with attachment relationships and emotional life and development from infancy. Adoption offers the possibility of a new beginning and of regeneration, but it also contains the potential for disappointment, destruction and at its worst psychological disaster; psychologically, adoption is therefore a highly charged – one might say ‘supercharged’ – process. It is a fi eld in which diverse realms of individual experience and society interact. It spans the inner and outer worlds in particularly complicated ways. It involves the internal worlds of the birth family and adoptive child and family; the themes of parental sexuality, procreation or infertility; the professional networks around looked after children and around adoption and adoptive families; the law and the legal system; social and cultural values and beliefs; ideology; and even myth. As a psychological fi eld, adoption thus involves a distinctive constellation of emotional forces.