Adoption and the Fantasy of An Idealized Other

Application of Ideas About Unconscious Narcissistic Configurations to a Life Situation

Allen Siegel – Renee Siegel

Whether openly acknowledged by an adoptee or present in an unconscious form, the act of adoption carries its own special set of feelings and fantasies. Despite the many stories of successful adoptions, the word “adoption” itself, at once accepting and rejecting, evokes a curious melange of affects. In this single word, the terror of abandonment enjoins the elation of affirmation to create a tension-filled counterpoint. Perhaps it is this tension of conflicting affects that accounts for the unending fascination about adoption in both life and mythology.

Legends of abandoned children, rescued from despair and eventually adopted, flourish in countless mythologies. Usually these stories have a happy ending. While they touch upon the trauma of the initial abandonment they primarily emphasize the positive pole of the ambivalence, the rescue from despair and the turn of ill-fortune into golden opportunity. The examples are many. Moses, Tarzan, Superman, Little Orphan Annie and Snow White, to name but a few, are all stories of adoptees who surmount travail to live happily ever after. Whatever their real-life story, it invariably seems miraculous and of special interest when we learn that accomplished people like Aristotle, Louis Armstrong, and Edward Albee were adopted as well.

The Oedipus story, another famous abandonment myth, does not end with similar good fortune. Freud’s take on this story was, of course, influenced by the theory he was developing. Viewed through the lens of his evolving ideas, Freud explained Oedipus’ disastrous behavior as being motivated by sexual and aggressive drives. Another possible understanding of the story is that Oedipus’s patricidal and incestuous behavior were vengeful expressions of Oedipus’ rage over his father’s abandonment and intended infanticide. One explanation is as plausible as another.

Because of the uniqueness of adoption within the usual flow of life events, its difference presents an intriguing opportunity for psychoanalytic study, yet the psychoanalytic literature on adoption is startlingly sparse. The new psychoanalytic PEP CD ROM contains only 9 title references to adoption among its 33,000 fully encoded articles. We are puzzled by this discovery in view of the notion, perhaps misguided, that adopted children come for treatment in disproportionate numbers (Schechter, M. 1960, 1967, Watkins & Fisher 1993).

We don’t have an explanation for the paucity of psychoanalytic literature. In our view, the act of adoption creates a psychoanalytic laboratory, rich in learning opportunities. Through this paper we hope to add a new hypothesis to the adoption literature. We are interested in the phenomenon of the elaboration of a fantasy about an idealized birth parent by some adopted children, and we have noticed that these particular children coincidentally seem to have troublesome relationships have with their adoptive parents. We hope to demonstrate that the presence of these idealizations support Kohut’s conceptualization of an idealized parental imago, a primary, non-defensive unconscious configuration that is concerned with the “search” for and merger with a “perfect other.” Conversely, we hope to demonstrate the utility of this concept by viewing some adoptive situations through its lens.

We contend that when the healthy idealizations of the adopted child are interfered with because of some disturbance in the relationship with the adoptive parents, the child, acting under the influence of the unconscious configuration, searches for another idealizeable figure and has one readily available in the lost, but imaginable, birth parent. It is our observation that when the unconscious constellation that motivates the search for an ideal other becomes amalgamated with the fantasied image of the lost birth parent, the ensuing fantasy interferes with the already disturbed idealization of the adoptive parents and reinforces a disruption among all partners in the adoption.

We emphasize, along with other authors (Brinich 1990, Watkins & Fisher 1993), that the unconscious attitudes and fantasies of the adopted person do not, a priori, imply psychopathology. Rather, the attitudes and fantasies of the adopted are understandable and arise from the special circumstances of their birth and later adoption. Many navigate the issues of adoption, both conscious and unconscious, without untoward internal disorganization. This is especially so when the adoptive parents are psychologically equipped to create a loving, understanding and accepting ambiance in which the sadness, pain and mourning for veryone involved, both parents and child, can be acknowledged, embraced and worked through.

Mindful of the complex interactive system involved in any adoption, Brinich (1990), in his sensitive and thorough review, reminds his readers that it is impossible to understand adoption from an intrapsychic point of view without considering the entire system. As an example of one possible adoptive situation, among a variety of other possibilities, Brinich reminds his readers of the child who was not wanted by his biological parents and of the adoptive parents who were unable to conceive. Brinich suggests that, “Adoptive parents must manage this transformation of their child – from unwanted to wanted – not only in the mind of the child but also within their own thoughts.”

Describing the struggle of the adoptive parent whose attitudes affect their adopted child, Brinich writes further:

“Unfortunately the adoptive parents’ fantasies regarding their (nonexistent) biological child are not at all inactive. They silently color many aspects of the relationship between adoptive parents and their adopted child. And, of course, they are not alone in this process; sooner or later the adopted child also develops his own fantasies about his biological parents. These fantasies – whether they reside within an adoptive parent or within the adopted child – are not necessarily pathogenic. However, the clinical literature contains many examples of families in which such fantasies prevented one person or another from being the real person in front of them. (The adopted playwright, Edward Albee, offers an especially powerful example of such fantasies as the focal point of his play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?”),” (page ?).

Brinich describes the unique psychological task confronting each partner of the adoptive threesome as one where each member needs to mourn his or her particular lost fantasied object. For the parents, it is their lost fantasied biological child and for the child, it is the lost fantasied birth parents. Brinich asserts that ambivalence is an inevitable complication of the adoptive situation since all parents and children have the experience of loving and hating each other at times. In the biological triad, Brinich suggests, the reality that all three members belong to each other aids in their individual integrative task of containing the loved and hated parts in the image of one person rather than to split them off into separate entities. The situation for the adoptive triad is different since the child does, in fact, have another set of parents, however little he might know about them. Because the birth parents do exist, it is possible for the adopted child to split off affective aspects of the adoptive parent, and project them onto the lost but fantasied birth parent. The situation is similar for the adoptive parent, for while the child is now his or hers, the child carries genetic endowments from others which enable the adoptive parent to attribute whatever “bad” elements are present to the fantasied birth parent and not to consider his or her possible contribution to the unhappy situation.

The psychoanalytic literature on adoptive fantasies begins with Freud’s paper entitled, “Family Romances” (Freud 1908) in which Freud describes the separating child’s attempt to gain distance from his or her parents through the elaboration of a fantasy that the child is actually an adopted child. In this paper Freud describes the young child’s normal, unconsciously motivated, non-defensive idealization of his parents which is the phenomenon that interests us. Freud, and those who have written after him, however, seem to have abandoned the idea that this phenomenon of unconscious experience is one that might have major import in a child’s, and later adult’s, emotional life.

Writing about the phenomenon of the child’s idealization, Freud comments that the parents of the young child are experienced as the “only source of authority.” They are, he writes, the ”source of all belief” and notes that the young child’s greatest wish is to be big like father and mother. Freud is clear in his description that this idealization is a primary psychological event and not part of any secondary defensive operation, an important observation that we will return to shortly. In what sounds to the self psychologically informed ear like the description of a childhood disillusion and attempted restoration, Freud observes that with time and the child’s emotional growth comes the painful discovery that his parents were not as perfect as he had originally envisioned. In addition to this hurt, Freud suggests that the child also sustains a narcissistic injury when he feels slighted by the parents’ attention to each other and to the other siblings in the family as well. The disappointment engendered by the new-found parental imperfection plus the painful slight that comes when the child’s exclusive love for his parents is neither fully appreciated nor exclusively reciprocated culminate in the fantasy that it is impossible for him to be the “real” child of these disappointing people. Instead, as elaborated in the fantasy, he must be adopted.

Freud asserts that the child, wanting to be free of his or her hurtful and disappointing parents, wishes for new parents who:

“…as a rule, are of higher social standing. He will make use in this connection of any opportune coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming acquainted with the Lord of the Manor or some landed proprietor if he lives in the country or with some member of the aristocracy if he lives in town.” (Freud 1909, p 239).

In this observation Freud notes that the child is able to take advantage of reality situations in the elaboration of his fantasies. The ability of the child to attach unconscious contents to what amounts to day residues has special significance for the adopted child. Freud asserts that the fantasy of being adopted has two elements and he calls this first element the “asexual stage” of the fantasy. The second element of the fantasy occurs later, after the child has learned of the sexual processes.

In the revised second element of the adoption fantasy the father becomes a sexual rival and the mother becomes a sexual being with whom the child can now be sexual. In this revision the pre-pubescent child rids himself of his father but retains the mother as a sexual person. The fantasy of being adopted now serves a defensive function because it helps distance the child from the birth parents. Despite Freud’s description of its beginning as a restitutive, non-defensive idealization of the fantasied parents before it assumes its later defensive function, Freud overlooked the asexual stage of the fantasy when he named the entire fantasy the “neurotic’s family romance.” Freud explains the asexual stage of the fantasy as a wish to return to a happier time but he doesn’t explore the psychological micro-elements that made the earlier time happy. Our particular interest concerns the “asexual” element of the fantasy that Freud described but seems to have overlooked. Those authors who have written about the adopted child’s fantasy of the idealized birth parents follow Freud’s lead and discuss the fantasy only in defensive terms. They understand the idealization either as a defensive splitting of the child’s ambivalence, characterized by the statement, “these parents I live with are bad, those parents I imagine are good,” or as a way for the child to gain distance from sexual tensions and conflicts with the adoptive parents, characterized by the statement, “these aren’t really my parents so I need not fear my incestuous feelings” (Greenacre, 1958, Schechter 1960, 1967, Glenn 1975, Weider 1977, Brinich 1995). Like Freud, these authors overlook the non-defensive meaning of the earlier unconscious idealization. We call attention to this oversight in the psychoanalytic literature because we believe that the early non-defensive, asexual stage that Freud noted in the “family romance” is an important but generally overlooked conceptualization of one possible unconscious configuration (Kohut 1971).

The wish to attach to a perfect other is present in all children. When they are idealizable, the child’s wish attaches to the parents who are present regardless of whether they are birth parents or adoptive parents. When the parents fail in that function, the wish to attach to a perfect other seeks another target, which for adopted children, is readily available in the fantasy of the idealized birth parent. We contend that the unconscious need for union with an idealized object underlies the fantasy of an idealized birth parent and that sometimes the existence of this fantasy, in turn, interferes with the development of a secure bond with the adoptive parents. Of note is the fact that not all adopted children have this fantasy, a finding that leads to interesting questions.

Kohut’s psychology of the self is useful in answering some of these questions. Like Freud, in his paper Family Romance”(1908), Kohut also recognized the persistent childhood wish to retain a connection to a powerful, idealized, and idealizeable parent. Unlike Freud, however, Kohut pursued the analysis of the non-defensive aspects of the idealizations of some of his adult psychoanalytic patients and eventually incorporated what he learned from these explorations into his broader conceptualization of narcissism (Kohut 1966, 1968, 1971).

In this paper we focus on one element of Kohut’s conceptualization, namely the unconscious narcissistic configuration he called the idealized parental imago. We assert that the unconscious wish for union with a fantasied idealized object sits at the psychological heart of the adoptee’s curiosity about and sometimes driven search for the birth parents. In regard to any child’s unconscious idealizations, Kohut describes how the physical or emotional absence of the idealized object disrupts the usual course of narcissistic development for the child in his or her idealizing sector. When this occurs, the disrupted child searches for another person to whom he or she can assign the role required by the fantasy of a perfect other. Parent surrogates such as idealizeable relatives (aunts, uncles, grandparents), nannies, teachers, therapists and others sometimes fill this role. The adopted child, however, has yet another option since the unconscious idealization can readily attach to the unknown birth parents, creating one or both of them as ideal creatures. When this happens, the already disrupted relationship with the adoptive parent worsens. With the elaboration of the fantasied idealized birth parent the adopted child can now afford to turn against the disappointing adoptive parent because she has created the illusion of another source of safety and wholeness. The stabilizing union can occur in childhood fantasy or, later in life, the wish for merger with the idealized object can stimulate a search for the lost but unconsciously retained idealized birth parent.

The fantasy-life of adopted children and adults in our practices, fantasies reported in the scant literature of adoptees who have been in treatment, and fantasy-based creations of artists who were adopted as children are the sources of data for our hypothesis. The playwright, Edward Albee, is prominent among the latter as noted earlier by Brinich (1990).

Adopted by a wealthy family at two weeks of age, Albee’s adoptive mother was emotionally unavailable but intensely dominating. Albee writes, implicitly and explicitly, of his experience as an adopted child in a number of his plays. For instance, a lost child is a central feature of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf,” while Albee’s grizzly “The American Dream” speaks of an adopted child who was purchased as an object rather than as a child to be loved. In the latter play, the adoptive parents, disappointed with their new infant’s behavior, invite the worker from the Bye-Bye Adoption Service to their home to discuss their unhappiness. It seems that when the infant only had eyes for Daddy, Mommy poked out “its” eyes. When “it” masturbated they cut off “its” hands and penis and when “it” spoke obscenely to Mommy they cut out “its” tongue. Piece by piece they dismember the child and when “it” eventually dies they call the agency to complain and seek recompense for the damaged goods they were given.

While Albee’s conscious issues concerning his adoption are overt in “The American Dream,” some seemingly unconscious issues emerge in “Tiny Alice.” Much of the dialogue in “Tiny Alice” is an ironic repartee among all the characters of the play with Julian, the central character and an outsider among a group of intimates, bearing the brunt of their irony until finally he is shot. Abandoned and dying at play’s end, Julian delivers the play’s most poignant lines as he voices his sense of abandonment and his yearning to merge with a powerful other. To understand the following excerpt it is essential to know that Alice is Albee’s expression of God in this play.

Excerpt from “Tiny Alice”

Julian: ALICE!? Oh, Alice, why hast thou forsaken me? (Leans his head back to see the model) Hast thou? Alice? Hast thou forsaken me…with…all the others… Come talk to me; come sit by my right hand… Oh, what a priesthood is this! Oh, what a range of duties, and such parishioners, and such a chapel for my praise. (Turns some, leans toward the model, where the chapel light shines.) Oh, what a priesthood, see my chapel, how it…(Suddenly the light in the chapel in the model goes out. Julian starts, makes a sound of surprise and fear.) Alice?…God? SOMEONE? Come to Julian as he…ebbs. (We begin to hear it now, faintly at first, slowly growing, so faintly at first it is subliminal: the heartbeat…thump thump…thump thump…And the breathing)… Thou art my bride? Thou? For thee I have done my life? Ah God! Is that the humor? IS THIS MY PRIESTHOOD, THEN? THIS WORLD? THEN COME SHOW THYSELF! BRIDE? GOD? (Silence, we hear the heartbeat and the breathing some). SHOW THYSELF! FOR THEE I HAVE GAMBELED…MY SOUL? I DEMAND THY PRESENCE. ALICE! (The sounds become louder now, as, in the model, the light fades in the bedroom, begins to move across an upper story. Julian’s reaction is a muffled cry.) AGHHH! You…thou…art…coming to me? How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? Forever? …How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? COME, BRIDE, COME, GOD! COME! (The breathing and heartbeats much louder now. The light descends a stairway in the model.) Alice? ALICE? MY GOD, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME? (A great shadow, or darkening, fills the stage, it is the shadow of a great presence filling the room. The area on Julian and around him stays in some light, but, for the rest, it is as if ink were moving through paper toward a focal point. The sounds become enormous. Julian is aware of the presence in the room, “sees” it, in the sense that his eyes, his head move to all areas of the room, noticing his engulfment. He almost whispers loudly.) The bridegroom waits for thee, my Alice..is thine. O Lord, my God, O have waited for thee, have served thee in thy…ALICE? (His arms are wide, should resemble a crucifixion. With his hands on the model, he will raise his body some, backed up against it) ALICE?…GOD? (The sounds are deafening. Julian smiles faintly.) I accept thee, Alice, for thou art come to me. God, Alice…I accept thy will. (Sounds continue. Julian dies, head bows, body relaxes some…Sounds continue thusly: thrice after the death…thump thump thump thump thump thump. Absolute silence for two beats. The lights on Julian fade to black. Only then, when all is black, does the curtain slowly fall.)

Many critics find “Tiny Alice” confusing and even without meaning, but we believe the enigmatic nature of the play stems from the unconscious nature of its material. In “Tiny Alice,” Albee gives dramatic voice to the fantasy we wish to explore, the fantasy of a merger with an idealized object. His enigmatic lines assume a new clarity and power when heard as the voice of an adopted child caught in the confusion between the “thing” (the fantasy of an idealizeable mother) and its “representative” (an actually abusive adoptive mother). In Albee’s writing we also hear a yearning for the safety and comfort that are the outcome of a bond with an idealizeable object.

In some of his work Albee seems to be intensely concerned about the distinction between reality and illusion. Although it is impossible to know the source of this struggle, we believe that it might have originated in a childhood confusion over which set of parents is real and which set is illusory. It is safe to assume that quite early in his life, Albee’s adoptive mother was probably idealized as an object of hope but, for Albee, the reality of an optimal mother became a despairing illusion when she failed him as miserably as she did, a failure Albee discusses directly in an interview with Studs Terkel, a prominent figure on Chicago’s literary scene (Terkel 2000).

Our understanding of Albee’s struggle with reality and illusion, a dominant theme in his play “Tiny Alice,” is enhanced if we distinguish between the conscious and unconscious elements of Albee’s writing. In “Tiny Alice,” Albee’s confusion and concern about what is real, the “thing” or its “representative” symbol, probably reflects a conscious, secondary process question that is asked by many adopted children, namely, “Which set of parents do I consider real?”

A less obvious but equally present theme in “Tiny Alice” is Albee’s wish to merge with an ideal other. We speculate that this theme probably emanates from an unconscious primary process thought that persists unmodified because the infantile need in the idealizing sector of the early personality was inadequately fulfilled and left Albee with a continued yearning for such a union. In “Tiny Alice” we find evidence of Albee’s persistent idealized fantasy and we speculate that the unconscious origins of this persistent fantasy is similar to the unconscious experience of other adopted children whose adoptive parents were emotionally out of step with them.

For further data to support our thesis we turn to the literature on adoption that, while sparce, does contain several reports of adopted children who have been in treatment (Sherick 1983, Wieder 1977, Brinich 1990). In these reports all the authors attribute the idealization of the birth parent to the defensive functions of splitting the ambivalence or to distancing themselves from the dangerous Oedipal objects, as we described earlier. Omitted from the authors’ remarks, but present in our reading of these materials is the finding that when these children have elaborated fantasies of idealized birth parents there simultaneously has been a troubled relationship with the adoptive parent.

Finally, we turn to our practices to obtain additional support for our hypothesis. We begin our clinical material with Mary, a twenty-eight year old woman who came for treatment because she was depressed and anxious over an ongoing situation at work that involved a man whom she believed was “looking at her.” Although he never spoke to Mary, nor she to him, Mary felt that the man was flirting with her. She believed he stared at her but when she returned the look he seemed to avert his gaze. After a year of this persistent perception, and with the encouragement of a mutual friend, Mary confronted the man and asked him for a date. He turned her down and then told their mutual friend that he never was interested in Mary, who, of course, was crushed. She was certain that he had been paying special attention to her.

Mary, adopted at birth, never considered that her adoption had any special meaning for her. She did, however, describe a difficult relationship with her adoptive mother and explained that she couldn’t remember ever feeling close to her. She felt constantly misunderstood by her mother and, in fact, stopped talking to her about anything important when she was only seven years old. Mary finds it difficult to be in her mother’s presence and has minimal contact with her except during family celebrations For maternal nurturing she turned to an older woman in her neighborhood.

Mary longs to have a meaningful relationship with a man but she has never dated anyone who is truly available. In her relationships, Mary becomes anxious and protects herself by anticipating the needs of the man she is with and how they will respond to her. In the first year of her treatment, Mary talked of the discomfort she feels in these relationships and of the overwhelming task she set for herself of anticipating what the other person required. Mary described how, when she was involved with someone, she neither expressed her wishes directly nor confronted “off the mark” behavior. Instead, she became paralyzed and withdrew into fantasy conversation without articulating what she felt.

During the second year of treatment Mary began to embrace her profound sadness over the “missed opportunities” in her life. She felt she had wasted time hiding within her self, unable to experience relationships of true mutuality. At about the same time she became involved in a similar fantasy with another man. Once again, Mary thought the man was looking at her and that he turned away as soon as she exchanged his glance. Six months elapsed before Mary spoke to the man, asking him for help with a work-related project. While he expressed interest in joining her in the project he never followed through and when she called to ask about his plans he didn’t return her calls. Mary wished her attraction to him would end but she felt that his continuous stare captured her. When, several months later, she finally confronted him and asked if he were interested in her, he denied his interest and explained that he already was involved with someone.

After Mary’s second fantasy flirtation we explored the fantasy more deeply and identified her silent wish to be recognized, to be known for who she is, and to be admired. Coincident with the dawning of this awareness Mary developed an interest in her adoption and she turned to her father for information. He responded openly, telling Mary what he knew about the adoption and together they tearfully explored the archive of family pictures.

The dogged persistence of Mary’s fantasy piqued our curiosity and directed our attention to its possible unconscious origins. While initially the meaning of the fantasy was unclear, the fantasy reminded us of the experience of another adopted woman in our practice. This woman, whose father died when she was very young and who was adopted by her step-father when she was seven, carried a life-long idealized fantasy about her lost father. Although she had no active memory of her birth father she did have the fantasy, beginning in childhood and persisting throughout her adult years, that her birth father was vaguely “overhead,” watching her admiringly, intent on keeping her safe. This fantasy experience of a child who lost her parent early in life sensitized us to the possibility of persistent unconscious childhood idealizations that can continue into adulthood. In concert with the hypothesis that persistent unconscious idealizations are the outgrowth of an aborted developmental process in the idealizing sector of the personality we note that this woman had a troubled experience with both her difficult mother and her loving but insensitive adoptive step-father.

Changing our perspective, we now present the obverse of the above situations with the study of two adopted children, each of whom had an idealizeable adoptive parent. We particularly call attention to the fact neither of these two children established a persistent idealized fantasy of their birth parent that in turn might have interfered with the adoptive experience despite the fact that each child was adopted into complicated and potentially confusing situations.

The first child we’ll present is Tommy, who was initially seen for evaluation when he was five years old. Tommy, adopted in an open adoption at birth, has a white birth mother and an African American and Hispanic birth father. He is the middle child in a sib-ship of three. Tommy’s siblings were not adopted. They are fair in skin color, have blond hair, and resemble their mother. Tommy’s parents have created an atmosphere in their home where discussion of Tommy’s adoption, of being bi-racial, of the differences and similarities between and among the children, and of tolerance about differences among people can be explored.

Mother first voiced her concern about Tommy after an incident in which Tommy hit his baby-sitter with a hockey puck. Coincidentally, during that same week, Tommy had become frightened when mother left the children alone with a sitter. A search for a possible precipitant of Tommy’s agitation revealed that mother’s attention had been diverted to Tommy’s younger brother who was ill that week. Tommy had another outburst that week when mother asked him to put on his coat before he went outdoors to skate. He refused to put on his coat, saying that he “did not want to look different than the other kids,” a concern Tommy had voiced earlier in terms of his having different color skin than either of his siblings.

When I saw Tommy for the first session, I told him that I knew about the hockey puck incident, that mom told me he had been angry with his sister and brother, and that he was having trouble when mom left the house without him. He complained that his younger sister wouldn’t let him into his room and that his older brother wouldn’t let him play with his gerbils. Tommy brought his special blanket, the one he sleeps with, and his adored very black stuffed puppy to the next session. As Tommy held his puppy he eyed a black and white stuffed puppy sitting on my bookshelf. He suddenly pulled my puppy off the shelf, bit it, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it. When I asked why he treated the puppy that way, he said it was “bad,” but he couldn’t explain how or why. He did show me, however, how his own black puppy could do flips and summersaults, which I understood to be an expression of Tommy’s strong need to show me how adequate, independent, and strong he is. We then talked about colors and I commented that in our previous session Tommy had told me about the eye color of his whole family. I wondered about colors of other things such as skin colors. I teased him a bit, and asked him if he had ever seen green people since he had just told me that people are all different colors. I asked what color his skin is and he pulled up his sleeve and said that his arm is brown but other places on him are white. I wondered what color his mom was, and Tommy said, “Green!” I wondered if she was born green, and with a straight face, Tommy said, “No, she is Green Slime,” a reference to a toy called Slime. He then moved to the window to see if his mother had returned in her car and was waiting for him outside. When she wasn’t there Tommy said, “No car.” I asked Tommy if he was worried about her returning and he said that he wasn’t. Tommy next played with an older doll in my dollhouse and said it was a babysitter. I wondered aloud whether it was difficult for him when his mom went away and left him with a sitter. He denied having any trouble at all when she left him. I said his mom had told me it was hard for Tommy when she leaves and that he cries when she leaves but again Tommy denied this.

A few days later, Tommy’s mother told me that Tommy had been merciless with his younger sister. He tortured her verbally, telling him that he is a baby and can’t do the things Tommy can do. In addition, Tommy announced to his sister that the sister’s birth mother was dead! Mother corrected Tommy by telling him that she is his sister’s birth mother and asked Tommy if he thought his birth mother was dead. When Tommy replied, “No,” his mother spoke once again about his birth mother, telling him that she was only sixteen years old when he was born and that she “could not take care of any baby.” She said Tommy seemed to settle down after that.

Mother reported that people often tell her that Tommy’s siblings look so much alike and that these comments are difficult for Tommy to hear. I suggested that she continue to affirm Tommy’s distress in these situations. Regarding information about Tommy’s birth mother, I suggested that she give Tommy only factual information when he seemed to request it. I told her I didn’t think explanations softened Tommy’s pain, and that continued reference to his birth mother might be upsetting for him. I suggested that she continue to tell Tommy how important a member of the family he is, and how much he is loved.

When Tommy came for his third appointment, he was carrying a black and white spotted Beanie Baby dog and a brown Beanie Baby dog. He held both animals closely and with great affection. He looked for my stuffed puppy again and this time he called it a fox. He stomped on it, pulled its neck, stuck its tail under the door and said it was “dead.” I told Tommy that I knew from his mother that he had difficulty settling down after he left here last week and that he had been particularly hard on his sister. While he denied this, he did say that he had some “feelings.” He told me that he had been a good brother today because he found his sister’s ball in his room and had given it back to him. With pleasure, he also told me his older brother had allowed him to pet his gerbil.

Mother later told me that the week had been much better. Tommy was more settled and she was looking forward to celebrating his birthday although she was concerned about what that day might mean to him. Confirmation of our thought that Tommy’s upcoming birthday might upset him because it stirred issues of his birth and subsequent adoption came in the form of Tommy’s question about who picked his name when he was born. Mother assured him that she chose his name and reminded him that he was named for her own father and brother. I wondered, but did not share with mother, whether Tommy had been flooded and confused by the amount of information available to him about his adoption without actually understanding what his parents wanted to convey. Tommy settled down after our third session and we all agreed that he did not need another appointment.

I saw Tommy again, one year later when he was one and one-half years old and was about to enter first grade. Mother was worried over another incident with the babysitter. Trouble began when the sitter suggested that the children eat lunch and she gave Tommy’s sister the one remaining yogurt. Tommy became enraged, jumped on his sister, and began to choke her. In an effort to help Tommy settle down, the sitter sent him to his room which he immediately destroyed and then ran outside as the sitter tried to calm him. Tommy told the neighbor who found him running around next to the school that he “did not have a family.”

With close questioning mother was able to identify a precipitant for Tommy’s outburst. It seems that a week earlier Tommy had accompanied his father on a trip to attend the christening of his bi-racial seven- month old boy cousin who had been adopted into a family that had a three year old natural born daughter. Mother stayed home because she was afraid to leave Tommy’s younger sister who was ill. During the visit the family talked a lot about adoption. Upon his return, Tommy learned that his brother, sister and mother had gone to a movie without Tommy. He became furious about being left out, even though he had spent the weekend having a good time with father.

During this period of treatment, I saw Tommy and his mother together for three appointments. Tommy volunteered his fantasy that he had lived with his birth mother for a while before he came to live with his adoptive family. Mother corrected him saying that, in fact, he had been with his adoptive family ever since he was two days old. Tommy didn’t seem convinced and had no apparent response other than to continue his play and conversation. In the following two sessions Tommy was able to talk about his upset, about his jealousy over his brother and sister having spent the weekend with his mother, and about how frightened he was when he lost control of himself.

This material addresses some of the expectable, non-pathologic upset an adopted child might experience as he struggles to integrate the facts of his birth and “who he really is” with the question of “To whom does he belong?” In both instances, Tommy’s rage was precipitated when his tie to his adoptive mother was threatened. He became vulnerable when he was uncertain about the strength and security of that tie and he resorted to a fantasied restitution with his birth mother in which he imagined that she was a good provider who did care for him.

This material also demonstrates the positive impact an adoptive parent can have upon an adopted child when he or she is attuned to his special struggles. Despite her periodic anxious responses, Tommy’s mother was an easily idealizable mother. Her emotional availability and sensitivity to Tommy’s special issues enabled him to form a secure bond with her and her responses, in turn, allowed him to create her as an idealizable object. This sequence enabled the developmental process, in the idealizing sector of Tommy’s personality, to unfold without undue interference. The healthy idealization of Tommy’s adoptive mother obviated the need for an idealization of his birth parents, even though Tommy did have a momentary wish to return to his birth mother during a time of marked vulnerability.

The last child to we wish to present is Maria, an eleven and one-half year old girl born in Nicaragua and adopted by her current family (mother, father, and two older brothers), when she was seven years old. To the best of our knowledge, Maria’s birth mother died while giving birth when Maria was three years old. Maria had lived with her birth father in their Nicaraguan village until the age of four when her drunken father hit her and knocked her into an open fire. She sustained burns over thirty percent of her body and was taken from her village to a large nearby city where she spent the following year in a hospital. Her burns involved her neck, torso, and right arm that had become fused to her chest.

Maria was discovered by an American film team who was documenting the pro bono work of American surgeons who treated children in the area. One of Maria’s surgeons developed a fondness for her and brought her to the United States to live with him and his wife. This living arrangement did not work out and after nine months Maria moved in with the woman film editor who originally discovered her. This arrangement also failed and Maria was adopted into her present family shortly before she began first grade.

Maria seemed to make a good adjustment to her new family. Her adoptive parents had always wanted a daughter and they both were supportive of Maria’s needs and understanding of her traumas. Maria was scheduled to begin sixth grade in the fall of the year I first saw her, in an effort to recover her two lost academic years. Six months earlier, according to mother, Maria became “weepy” and complained of generalized anxiety when her adoptive mother suffered a brief depression. Prior to mother’s upset, mother described Maria as easy-going, friendly, accommodating, and happy to have people’s attention. Mother said that Maria was sensitive to people’s opinion of her and that she slanted stories if she thought someone might disapprove of what she had to say. Mother also worried that Maria didn’t seem to have any noticeable reaction when her brothers told her she didn’t look like the rest of the family. Worrisome, too, was Maria’s stoic response to sad movies.

When I first saw Maria, she had already begun her surgical reconstruction. She gave me a chronological history of her past experiences but was unable to remember her family of birth. She said she felt “lucky” to have been adopted and said that she would be dead if she were still in Nicaragua. When I asked if she were curious about her birth family, Mercedes unhesitatingly denied any curiosity.

A talented artist, Maria expressed her feelings through her drawings. She spoke easily and openly about her sadness at feeling insecure in her friendships but said little of her life prior to her move to the United States. She did, however, share the fantasy with me that she daydreamed about her birth mother every night before she was able to fall asleep. Maria wondered what her mother looked like and whether she resembled her. In our sessions we spoke about Maria’s many losses and about her sadness. She wished that someday her adoptive mother would take her to Nicaragua although she was afraid to suggest this for fear she would hurt her adoptive mother’s feelings. Wonderfully in tune with her daughter, Maria’s adoptive mother expressed her desire to take Maria to Nicaragua when she was ready and able to ask. About four months into treatment Maria went to an art fair and told me when she came upon a portrait of a Latino woman she said, “I’ll bet that is what my mother looked like!”

After one year of treatment Maria said she felt much better. She faced additional surgery, but she was not yet frightened about it. She felt ready to end her treatment. During termination Maria talked about celebrating her thirteenth birthday, of her anticipation at entering a new school for seventh grade, and of not feeling like a little girl anymore. Maria was upset over not having performed at grade level in math yet, but she felt happy about her improved reading performance. She was proud that she was going to be a paid day camp counselor in the summer.

Maria returned for therapy one year later, following surgery for the reconstruction of her chest. While this surgery was “minor” compared to previous procedures, Maria had to wear a heavy elastic body stocking in order for her skin to heal properly. She told me that she felt “like a freak” and she worried that people stared at her. She remembered that her first “adoptive parents” didn’t keep her, and that she had been “rude and queenly-acting” with the film editor who had initially befriended her. She told me that she had fantasies about choosing to be deaf or blind rather than burned. Now, at fourteen, she felt that “nothing was right.”

Mother reviewed the past year and told me that Maria was caught shoplifting last spring. According to Maria, a girl threatened to tell schoolmates about her burns if she did not steal. Mother worries that Maria feels ugly. Maria recently shared with mother that she wished her adoptive family were Latino because it was painful that she did not look like any members of her family. She also shared that every night she has a fantasy that perhaps she looks like her birth mother.

Maria continued in treatment for six months. In our work this time, she was open about her fears and curiosity over sexual development. She mourned her lost family and expressed anger and disappointment about her early years. She spoke about her fear of being abandoned and of her interest in eventually visiting Nicaragua. Maria became more confident in her physical appearance and more comfortable with her scarred body. She finished the school year feeling upbeat and confident.

After our last termination, Maria contacted me twice more. In the first contact, six months after termination, she sent me a birthday card in which she wrote “I really want to thank you for everything…so thanks!” One year after that, in our second post-termination contact, Maria sent me a note in response to a gift of shower gel and lotion that I sent for eighth grade graduation. She wrote,

“Oh god I just noticed how I’m writing a little like my mother!!! You’ve been so great w/me the times we talked was great. I got a lot off my chest. Thanx. I really like to talk and use those intellectual words (smiley face)…but enough cheese, thank you so much (hearts drawn), I miss ya, Maria.”

Maria presents an unusual situation for us in that her adoption occurred at a later age and under unusual circumstances. Her fantasy experience with her birth mother differs from the others we have presented in that she did experience an actual idealization of an actual mother. Maria’s bedtime fantasy, therefore, partakes of memory as much as it does of fantasy. Even so, Maria is able to form an idealization of her admirable adoptive mother and she is capable of forming other idealizations as well. It is at times when she is vulnerable, such as when she faces surgery or even when she is falling asleep, that she returns to her earlier idealization for succor and stability. The idealization Maria has of her birth mother, however, does not have the driven intensity and insistence that precludes the idealization of others. We ascribe this to the comfortable relationship she has with idealizeable adoptive parents. Despite the trauma in her life, Maria is an engaging and resilient child. Perhaps this resilience is reflective of what Marian Tolpin calls the “leading or forward edge” of development, in which there remains a healthy part of the self that becomes accessible to the patient and therapist during the working through of the transference (Tolpin, 2000).

Conclusion

Although our series is limited, we believe that our observations about the adopted child’s persistent fantasy of the idealized birth parent points in a direction for further study by those who treat adopted children. The persistent fantasy of the idealized birth parent can be considered to be both an expression of the unconscious need to find an idealizable object described by Kohut and an expression of a disruption in the idealizability of the adoptive or step-parent. Clinical implications flow from this observation for it draws attention to the interactions among the adoptive triad.

Finally, we have taken the adopted child’s fantasy of the idealized birth parent as an opportunity to discuss and underscore the import and clinical utility of the unconscious fantasy in therapeutic work. We wish to highlight this issue because of our concern over the trend in current psychoanalytic thinking in which the therapeutic relationship alone is emphasized as the curative element in psychoanalytic treatment, while understanding, exploring, interpreting, and working through of unconscious fantasy as essential curative elements is de-emphasized.(Siegel 1999).