Chapter 13 The Adoptive Father

Most accounts of adoption give very little space to the adoptive father. Whilst rightful emphasis is given to the adopted child or adoptee, to the natural or birth parents, and to the adoptive mother, even specific discussions of the adoptive parents give the father only a small mention. In short the adoptive father is a bit of a nonentity. Such an attitude underlies our current notion of adoption in western culture, and expresses a primitive emotion and thinking, a “myth” in Bion's sense, indicative of a level of growth and certain preconceptions and fragmented forms of thinking (Bion, 1962b: 63, 67) The adoptive father holds much the same sort of peripheral place in the adoptive family that Joseph, overshadowed by the infant Jesus and his mother Mary, holds in the Holy Family. Yet this lack of emphasis is markedly different from the family as understood by Freud, where the Oedipal conflict underlies all relationships, and where the role of the father is central. Freud's relationship to his own father, in historical reality and in his central early works (in particular The Interpretation of Dreams where many important dreams are about his own father), underlies the development of his theory of the Oedipus complex. Later, from 1905 onwards, the doctor experienced the father is central to the development of the concept of transference, the main psychological mechanism of understanding in psychoanalytic treatments.

The comparative neglect of the adoptive father is in part due to the absence, until very recently, of cogent and fully expressed psychoanalytically informed views about the role of the father within the family. Yet the very marginal view of the adoptive father flies in the face of the intuition and experience of many who work in the field of adoption, who see the role of adoptive father as crucial in practice to successful and unsuccessful adoptions alike.

I believe, and will outline in this chapter, that the adoptive father has a key role in the