PROLOGUE

In 1999, Betty Jean Lifton, Kerstin Kupfermann, and Linda Gunsberg created an Adoption Study Group as an outgrowth of a year-long speakers series planned by Kerstin Kupfermann for the organization Long Island Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. In 2002, the Adoption Study Group was expanded to include the following members: Judith Eckman-Jadow, Ruth Lax, Julie Marcus, Linda Mayers, Billie Pivnick, and Sandy Rosengarten. All members of the Adoption Study Group were psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. Five of the group members were adoptive mothers, one was an adoptee and biological mother, one was an adoptive grandmother-to-be, and two were biological mothers. Thus, three out of the nine Adoption Study Group members were not directly members of the adoption triad. The adoption triad is defined as either the birth mother (and/or father), the adoptee, and the adoptive parent(s).

The Adoption Study Group met once a month and alternated between reading clinical adoption papers and adoption research, case presentations involving the adoption triad, and sharing personal adoption experiences. The dissolution of the group as a clinical discussion group occurred in 2006, when two of the three founding group members relocated from New York. It is important to mention that adoption issues, such as feelings of abandonment, denial of the birth mother's existence, absence of discussion of the birth father, and fears that reunion with birth parents would dramatically alter the bond between the adoptee and his or her adoptive parent(s), were stimulated by, and sometimes even enacted in, the group itself.

The majority of articles in this Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue were developed as a result of ideas discussed in this study group. Surprisingly, our Adoption Study Group's lively differences and disagreements culminated in agreement regarding two overarching ideas.

The first overarching idea is the importance of the evolution of a life narrative for the adoptee that incorporate