ABSTRACT
This chapter, combining theoretical thoughts with passages of personal memoir, focuses on the journey that both adopted children and adoptive parents go through from the inner state of “turning away” to the inner state of “turning to”, and from the experience of “nowhere-ness” to the experience of “being at home”. Using the terms “hypotonia” and “hypertonia” in their psychic context, the chapter describes a unique form of attachment that characterizes children who have undergone severe primary trauma. In this kind of attachment, instead of a constant movement between a state of connection and a state of separation, there is a negation of both: since hypotonia is not a state of separation but of non-connection, whereas hypertonia is not a state of connection but a state of adhesion–both hypertonia and hypotonia imply an attack on bonding and linking. The chapter suggests understanding adoption as a radical form of hospitality, one that challenges the borders of the host’s mind and body, but also allows, through this very challenging, to truly let both the ‘strange’ and the ‘stranger’ in.
