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Adele Kaufman presents a richly described treatment of a four-year-old adopted child, Ella, and evocatively succeeds in both demonstrating the efficacy of child analysis in a very young child, as well as the important psychodynamic and developmental issues specific to the adopted child. Here she shows the myriad ways in which both the facts of adoption, and the myths that parents and child develop about the adoption, become interwoven into all aspects of the child's psychological functioning. I plan to discuss the article from both these points of view: working with the adopted child, and issues of technique and therapeutic action in the analysis of preschool children.
Ms. Kaufman's article describes the complex ways in which the specific circumstances of the adoption, as well as the fantasies and conflicts arising from both parents’ and child's experience of adoption, enter into the child's difficulties and into the treatment. She particularly demonstrates the importance of the parents’ own fantasies, for in this case it is clear that parental issues and conflicts interfered with their empathic attunement to their daughter's affects and fears. She concludes with the recommendation that the timing of telling a child about her adoption should take into account her cognitive capacity to understand object permanence and to understand separation as other than a forever loss or punishment for misbehavior.
Ella's parents sought the consultation with Ms. Kaufman for her aggressive, controlling, and provocative behavior of several years. They did not relate the timing of their consultation nor Ella's difficulties to the recent adoption of their infant son and the replacement of the nanny who had been with Ella since birth. From the first therapeutic encounter, Ella demonstrated her valiant attempts at mastery over feelings of helplessness and feared abandonment. She urgently sought to assure Ms. Kaufman that she was a big enough girl to call her mother, mother rather than mom