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This book collects together the papers presented at the ‘Adoption of children and adolescents’ lecture series organized by the Centro de Atención Clínica e Investigación [Center for Clinical Practice and Research] in October 2000, whose speakers were members of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis of the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Madrid [Madrid Psychoanalytic Association]. The book has, therefore, many contributors, who have chosen different perspectives from which to analyze a topic that is very much present, not only in the media and in our practice, but especially in the life of many families who choose this form of parenthood for a variety of reasons.
This is a diverse and complex text that evinces the extensive experience of all the authors and clearly shows that psychoanalytic theory is their common foundation. Throughout each lecture, all the spaces and borders of adoption gradually find their place—institutions, professionals working there or in private practice, parents of diverse personal backgrounds who want to adopt and do so with very different motivations, and the relationships established among institutions, parents, and children who, being adopted at different ages, bear an array of internal histories.
Psychoanalytic theory throws light upon the vicissitudes of adoption, which is a very complex human experience. Two foreign parties meet at a certain moment, and from then on they will become adopting parents and adopted children. Both parties have to carry out specific tasks to ensure that the filiation experience leads to the construction of a family. Among such tasks, mourning processes play the main role. There are those undergone by each party, and those specific to the encounter, even though the latter may be either tinged with hope and love or concealed by denial and omnipotence.
Many psychoanalytic concepts traverse the book: extreme infantile dependence and the Other's structuring role; the significance of early object relatio