ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses more on the role of professionals in understanding some of their challenges and conflicting feelings relating to their work with adoptive families. Roy, the author, uses clinical material taken from individual psychotherapy and group sessions grounded in a psychoanalytic theoretic framework. She acknowledges that although social workers and psychotherapists do not have to live with the big, day-to-day struggles faced by adoptive families, they are nevertheless grappling with painful and complex issues stirred up through the work. Roy also shows how psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adopted children, young people, and their parents can provide a valuable insight into why a child or young person presents or behaves as he does. Roy argues that it is the strength of the therapeutic relationship that can facilitate a piecing together of aspects of a child’s experience, so that the past can inform the present, even if big “chunks” of the life story seem to have got “lost” along the way.
