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Containing 15 clinical papers on psychodynamic treatment with adopted patients, this recent publication adds appreciably to the growing body of adoption literature. The editors have assembled an array of papers that not only teach novices about the prevalence and significance of adoption in the world today, but also lay important groundwork for teachers, therapists, and parents eager to gain understanding of adopted children within a variety of contexts. In accordance with current research trends, the authors collected in this volume address the specific needs of all members of the adoption triad (Javier, et al., 2007). Prominent among them is the need to work through both unconscious loss and the fantasies that accompany the more concrete, unambiguous loss experienced by all adoptees. The papers place great emphasis on the notion that loss is a necessary and normal by-product of adoption that must be worked through successfully if an adopted child is going to integrate her fantasies about birthparents with her conscious and unconscious fantasies about her adoptive parents.
In many cases adoptions occur during the preoedipal period. This fact contributes greatly to an adoptee's need to sort out thoughts and feelings about the adoption experience. Chris Bonovitz's paper, “Unconscious Communication and the Transmission of Loss,” expands on the idea first discussed by Kirk (1964) in his groundbreaking book Shared Fate that emphasizes the feelings of loss shared by adopted child and adoptive parents. Both writers suggest that it is through this shared loss that each can connect with the other. Through their “intermingling loss,” parent and child can be healed by the new experience of becoming a family (p. 18). Bonovitz also addresses the potential for an “intergenerational transmission of trauma,” in which loss of a family member within the adoptive family may impact the experiences of the adopted child who may become the recipient of wishes to deny or to act as a replac