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Contemporary relational psychoanalytic approaches recognize that we are all “interested parties” in the analytic dyad—in the sense that despite the asymmetries inherent in such dyads (Aron, 1996), analysts, like analysands, are “personally involved” as participants in the intersubjective field (e.g., Hoffman, 2009). This is especially true of the Special Adoption Issue of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, in which the contributors and discussants have vested interests: What could be more personal and emotionally charged than our own experiences as children and parents in families formed by adoption? When sexual orientation is added to the mix, with the unfortunate baggage that psychoanalysis (not to mention the culture) brings in its historical approach to homosexuality, it may become difficult for any of us to “see or think straight,” so to speak. Given the impossibility, perhaps, of being able to know fully our unconscious reactions and contributions to the roundtable discussion—or the entire journal issue, for that matter—I offer my own subjective responses to the discussions by David Schwartz and Janine de Peyer, in an effort to further expand our consideration of the relational matrix involved in adoption and nontraditional families.
David Schwartz assumes that “beneath [my] actual participation [in the roundtable] lies an unconscious collision of [my] unambivalent positive perspective [on adoption] with [my] experience of an entire group representing a very conflicted perspective, both of which are modulated by [my] unconscious awareness of the widespread prejudices against gay male parenting, particularly in the psychoanalytic community” (p. 143). I agree that
creating a family through adoption has been a tremendous joy in my life, that I sensed many conflicted feelings coming from the rest of the group, and that the psychoanalytic community has been guilty of many prejudices toward gay men. I think he has constructed a very smart and perceptive narrative of a g