ABSTRACT
This chapter draws from an in-depth qualitative interview with a female subject to give a psychoanalytic and discursive reading of adoptive women’s experiences of meeting their biological fathers in adulthood. It relates the narrative data to three principle discursive constructions of the “reunion” experience: first, the themes of “truth”, subjectivity and belonging in relation to notions of loss and wounded subjectivity; second, discourses of eroticism and desire; and finally, the entanglements of cultural and familial politics in respect to “selfhood”. I argue that adoptive subjects have been widely constituted by an irreparable “primal wound” caused by the trauma of maternal separation (Verrier 1993). The figure of the wounded adoptee is bound up in discourses of erasure and repression, loss and longing and the idealisation of “real” parents rooted in biology (see Freedgood 2013; Schuker 2013; Schwartz 2013). As Andrew Cooper puts it, “The emotional realities of abuse, neglect and abandonment experienced by so many of the children who are placed for adoption are almost unthinkably painful” (2008: xiii). The adoption experience, symbolised by the “unthinkably painful” trauma of disconnection, then raises complicated questions about representing the “unrepresentable”.
