7. Adoption and the Fantasy
of an Idealized Object
Presenters: |
Allen M. Siegel, MD
|
Discussant: |
Susan Fisher, MD |
Self Psychology Page | 23rd Conference Program
Overview
In this workshop we consider the theoretical and clinical aspects of the adopted child’s idealizations of the fantasized birth parent, the actual adoptive parent, and the relationship between the two. The data for our study comes from fantasies of adopted children that have been reported in the literature, from creative productions of adopted artistic people such as Edward Albee, and from clinical material in our own practices. We hypothesize that the adopted child’s persistent idealization of the birth parents can be understood as both a symptom of a disturbance in the idealizability of the adoptive parent and an expression of the persistent unconscious need to have an idealizable object. The disrupted idealization in turn adversely effects the environmental matrix created between the adoptive parents and the adopted child. We will address the clinical implications of this understanding.