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In the winter of 2000, the faculty of the child and adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) met to discuss possible topics for a conference that was being planned for the following year. It did not take long before we arrived at the topic that everyone agreed was the one that needed to be developed: adoption and foster care from a psychoanalytic perspective. All agreed that the psychoanalytic community had much to contribute to our understanding of and ability to work with children (and their families) who have been or are in need of placement or who have been adopted.
We proceeded to explore the topic and search for those who were writing or presenting on these issues. We did discover that there was an ongoing study group in New York City discussing adoption and foster care and that there were a few analysts who had written some excellent papers on the topic. We were already aware that these problems were not only confronting families and children in the United States but were being studied in Europe as well. It was clear however, that much more needed to be understood and discussed in an open forum, and we believed (and hoped) that there would be many people interested in what psychoanalysts had to say on the topic.
We invited three analysts and a psychiatrist to write papers for the conference: Martin Silverman from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Jenny Kenrick from Tavistock Clinic in England; Catherine Mathelin, a Lacanian psychiatrist from Paris; and Francine Cournos, a psychiatrist from