ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly interrogates the primal wound discourse that currently dominates the adoption field in the United States and United Kingdom on a wider cultural discourse onto which this exposition can effectively be mapped. It invokes the intersection between private desire and the public sphere, the primal wound could be contextualised temporally as a product of trauma culture, responding to collective internal fantasy and desire, emotional damage and psychic pathology, as well as being located outside with the exposition of confession and vulnerability. The chapter argues that widely used cultural constructions of psychically wounded adoptive subjectivities have opened the subject up beyond the deterministic model of self hood towards vague notions of transcendence and the unknowable. It focuses on temporality of the idea of the wounded self, as a manifestation of trauma culture and medical, psychological and psychoanalytic discourses, in far-reaching accounts of the adoptive subject as being made up of both a layered self and an essential self.
