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The Emotional Experience of Adoption
Debbie Hindle and Graham Shulman (eds)
Routledge: Abingdon and New York, 2008
280 pp., £23.99
Reading this book is in itself an emotional experience, and one that is potentially life-changing for those whose life has been touched by adoption, whether personally or as a professional.
The book focuses, as it says in the title, on the many and complex emotions that are stirred by adoption in the children being adopted, in those adopting them, and by the professionals in the surrounding network. Several of the contributors acknowledge in their biographies that they are the parents of adopted children, and the sense of felt experience is palpable in the book.
In their introduction, Debbie Hindle and Graham Shulman set out their understanding of the complexity of the emotional task of adoption:
It is a field in which the diverse realms of individual experience and society interact. It spans the inner and outer worlds in particularly complicated ways. It involves the internal worlds of the birth family and adoptive child and family; the themes of parental sexuality, procreation or infertility; the professional networks around looked-after children and around adoption and adoptive families; the law and the legal system; social and cultural values and beliefs; ideology; and even myth. As a psychological field, adoption thus involves a distinctive constellation of emotional forces. (p. 1)
The book focuses on this complex field, and aims ‘to promote interest in, and curiosity about, the potential applications of a psychoanalytic perspective to the adoption process, and its relevance to the experience of adoption, amongst a wider audience than those who might access articles in professional journals’ (p. 3). The aim of the book is to think and reflect, not to advocate a particular way of working, but to raise awareness of the many dimensions of the emotions involved in adoption which need to be held in mind when