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As its title suggests, this book is not just about adoption; it also considers a wide range of psychological issues relating to the act of helping and protecting an ‘other’ mind, which has been displaced, at least temporarily, from ‘home’.
In speaking of adoption in this broader sense, we can say, like Ferenczi, that the process of adoption concerns the psychic pregnancy and then psychic birth which are necessary to allow the individual to accept the ‘other’ inside and outside of himself, so that he can recognize the other (in this case, the adopted child) in his difference and uniqueness. Therefore, this book is indeed about the adoptive functions, also within the psychoanalytic process, which are absolutely required in making contact with the ‘most primitive and often the most needy parts of the self’. These are the parts that did not receive the care and nurture they needed, when they needed it, and have not been able to develop. The subject that embodies these parts has remained unaware of them, has been unable to face them, or put them into words that would make it possible for him and others to understand them.
The author, a full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, was trained as a psychoanalyst in Milan with a special group of ‘classmates’ (Dina Vallino Macciò, Antonino Ferro, Parthenope Bion Talamo, Stefano Bolognini and myself, to name but a few) who have gone on to become established internationally known psychoanalytical authors. During the course of her 30 years as a practising psychoanalyst, the author has had extensive experience of working in the field of adoption. She has worked with teams that select suitable couples from among those who, wishing to adopt, apply to the juvenile court in Milan. She has also worked as a psychoanalyst for adoptive mothers and adopted children at the Benedetta d'Intino Centre, Milan, a private clinic which provides diagnoses and psychoanalytic psychotherapy for babies, children and young people and for their fam