ABSTRACT
The structure of the internal world of adopted children and their families is infl uenced in many subtle ways by their atypical life experiences. This is also the case for foster children and parents when long-term placements are made. In this chapter I describe how the complex internal worlds of participants in adoption dramas infl uence ongoing relationships within substitute families. This is an evolving process, and has a span beyond one lifetime because of intergenerational transmission. There is now a well-established understanding that adoption cannot be meaningfully understood as a one-off event or moment and needs to be seen as a process, whose meaning is re-worked throughout the life cycle (Rosenberg, 1992). Individual psychotherapeutic work can offer detailed descriptive accounts of adoptive experience from the perspective of internal reality, thus taking account of unconscious elements, and this is the primary evidential base from which this chapter is written.
