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Whether openly acknowledged or present in an unconscious form, the experience of adoption carries a special set of feelings and fantasies for all those involved. Despite the experience of adoption, the word adoption, at once accepting and rejecting, evokes a curious melange of affects for most people. In this single word, the terror of relinquishment joins the elation of affirmation to create a tension-filled counterpoint. Perhaps it is this tension that accounts for the unending fascination about adoption in both life and mythology.
Legends of abandoned children, rescued and eventually adopted, flourish in countless mythologies. Usually these stories have a happy ending. While they touch upon the trauma of abandonment, they primarily emphasize the positive pole of the ambivalence, the rescue from despair and the turn of ill-fortune into golden opportunity. The examples are many: Moses, Romulus and Remus, Tarzan, Superman, Little Orphan Annie, and Snow White, to name but a few.
The Oedipus story, another famous abandonment myth, does not end with similar good fortune. Freud's take on this story was, of course, influenced by the theory he was developing. Viewed through the lens of his evolving ideas, Freud explained Oedipus's disastrous behavior as motivated by sexual and aggressive drives. Another possible understanding of this story is that Oedipus's patricidal and incestuous behaviors are vengeful expressions of rage over his father's