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Siegel and Siegel's careful, original, interesting, and, in the best sense, disciplined paper is free of the reckless, research-free, developmental assumptions and negativistic generalizations of most earlier psychoanalytic writings on adoption, with the exception of the distinguished and valiant psychoanalyst Viola Bernard (1963, 1970, 1974). It is therefore a great pleasure for me to comment on it while placing it into a larger context. Let me begin with two quotes. The first is from the Talmud: “A mother is likened unto a mountain spring that nourishes the tree at its root, but one who mothers another's child is likened unto a water that rises into a cloud and goes a long distance to nourish a lone tree in the desert.” The second comes from a child in H. David Kirk's remarkable classic Shared Fate (1964): “The child who is born into his family is like a board that's nailed down from the start. But the adopted child, him the parents have to nail down, otherwise he is like a loose board in mid-air” (p. 160).
Although the Siegels indicate that the psychoanalytic literature on adoption is sparse, the psychiatric/social service/counseling literature based on that very small, clinically derived, theoretically aggressive psychoanalytic literature is vast. This analytically derived literature, which influenced both research and attitudes toward adoption for a generation, is very dark indeed. Basing their theory on this small