The Relationship to Self and Objects in Early Maternal Deprivation and Adoption*

This is a paper about adopted children's representations of the self and of objects, and how these representations are related to each other and to experience. The sources of this paper are varied; one is the psychoanalytic research done at the Anna Freud Centre in the Study Group on Adopted Children begun under Maria Berger's chairmanship, and these psychoanalytic data will be the main focus here. A second source is research I carried out in a study initiated by Professor Barbara Tizard. This examined children who spent their earliest years in residential nurseries before eventual adoption or restoration to their biological parents. Consideration of this will take us somewhat into recent developments in “attachment theory”. A third source has been the writings of other workers.

This is therefore a hybrid paper, and it presents something of an elephant-and-whale problem. The elephant, as the largest terrestrial mammal, and the whale, as the largest aquatic one, might well have interesting things to say to each other about their respective experiences. But is very difficult for them to get into any kind of communication, precisely because the one is terrestrial and the other is aquatic. This paper attempts to set up some kind of a dialogue.

Let me start by outlining something of the research findings from the study of children who spent their early years in residential institutions. This study was begun almost twenty years ago, by Barbara Tizard, as a study of the development of two-year-olds who had been cared for in residential nurseries since four months of age or earlier (Tizard & Tizard, 1971). These two-year-olds were compared with others who had always lived in intact families in their own homes. Subsequently, more children were added to the study, and followed up at the age of four-and-a-half. Let us pause at this point and look at what issues are relevant for us here.

Bowlby, in 1951, characterized maternal deprivation as “not uncommonly almost complete in inst