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Psychoanalytic theories have slowly filtered into criminal and family law. Beyond the Best Interests of the Child is the first attempt to systematically use its insights in the areas of adoption, foster care, and child custody. In this work, as slim and powerful as Anna Freud's written efforts usually are, she and her co-authors, Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit (the former a law professor and psychoanalyst and the latter a child psychoanalyst and former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association), have broken new ground, but they have also made a fundamental error. The new ground is in devising “a model child placement institute” founded on the basic premise that the child's psychological needs for growth in a stable environment and his perception of time must be central in court procedures affecting child placement.
The fundamental error is in placing (pun intended) child custody with adoption and foster care. In child custody battles both parents disagree as to who should raise their child. In adoption and foster care battles, a biological parent who has been physically and emotionally absent from the child, usually for many years, reappears and says, in effect, “Give me back my child: he belongs to me.”
The many strengths of this book are summarized in the “model child placement statute,” which may well be the first direct application of the psychoanalytic theory of child development to law. The unique and significant concepts actually defined in the proposed law include (1) wanted child, (2) psychological parent, (3) common-law parent-child relationship, (4) child's sense of time, (5) least detrimental available alternative, (6) state policy of minimizing disruption, (7) child's party status, and (8) final unconditional disposal and timely hearing and appeal. Each of these concepts appropriately places the needs of the child first. The enactment of such provisions into adoption and foster-care situations would require fundamental changes. Society woul