Adopted Women and Biological Fathers

Reimagining stories of origin and trauma

Elizabeth Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138691018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315536354
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Adopted Women and Biological Fathers offers a critical and deconstructive challenge to the dominant notions of adoptive identity. The author explores adoptive women's experiences of meeting their biological fathers and reflects on personal narratives to give an authoritative overview of both the field of adoption and the specific history of adoption reunion. This book takes as its focus the narratives of 14 adopted women, as well as the partly fictionalised story of the author and examines their experiences of birth father reunion in an attempt to dissect the ways in which we understand adoptive female subjectivity through a psychosocial lens.

Opening a space for thinking about the role of the discursively neglected biological father, this book exposes the enigmatic dimensions of this figure and how telling the relational story of 'reconciliation' might be used to complicate wider categories of subjective completeness, belonging, and truth. This book attempts to subvert the culturally normative unifying system of the mother-child bond, and prompts the reader to think about what the biological father might represent and how his role in relation to adoptive female subjects may be understood.

This book will be essential reading for those in critical psychology, gender studies, narrative work, sociology and psychosocial studies, as well as appealing to anyone interested in adoption issues and female subjectivity.

1

Wounded women

The discursive construction of adoption and maternal separation trauma

‘There is no such thing as a motherless child.’

(Yngvesson, 2004, p. 184)

We come from our mothers. The word ‘mother’ is synonymous with origin, creator and source. There is something curiously captivating then, about the notion of the motherless child. Often a central theme in mythology, as the stories of Moses and Oedipus demonstrate, our social and cultural fascination with the relinquished child relates to the most primal issues of belonging and alienation, care and neglect. In fairy tales, the woeful figure of the orphan or foundling often evokes a sense of injustice and guilt. It calls on us to respond. The mother/child relationship has typically been imagined as a normative responsibility in Western models of psychology and social practice. Within this logic of kinship attachments, the practice of adoption has traditionally been built on a form of ‘alternative parenthood’ (Kirk 1984, in Terrell and Modell, 1994, p. 155). The act of taking on another’s child as one’s own implies a severing of the original maternal roots and an appropriation of newness. A new identity is embodied and performed; a new reality is lived.

The theoretical focus on mothers has a long history. A large body of psychoanalytic literature has evolved around the Winnicottian idea of the ‘good enough’ mother. For Winnicott (1953), mothers develop a heightened sense of sensitivity towards their babies during pregnancy which continues after birth. The all-consuming maternal environment is a feminine space. Primary and intangible, Winnicott suggests that the personalised mother-infant experience is far removed from the world that exists outside. When awareness of the reality beyond this ‘primal maternal preoccupation’ returns, a ‘flight into sanity’ comes to pass. In this way, the mother occupies different registers: the private, protective space with baby, and the social space outside.

The idea that the original maternal space is gendered feminine sets it apart from the binary oppositional notion of the paternal outside. The feminine in this sense is intimate, mysterious and irrational; the masculine is social, visible and sane. The maternal space might then refer to basic inner concepts of nurturing and need, and the paternal function might be read in terms of such outwardly directed notions of authority, law and desire. The demarcation between the naturalised maternal and social paternal functions underscores from the start some of the key tensions and paradoxes this book seeks to discuss. It raises questions about subject and object, real and unreal, which are fundamental to the adoption and reunion experience. If the story of human origins lies within the natural mother-child bond, where does the mother in adoption stories fit? And what happens to the father?

Mourning the natural mother

Just as we all come from our mothers, so too are we separated from them. In The Undead Mother, Christina Wieland (2000) argues for the importance of recognising the power of the mother and grieving the disconnection from her. In the absence of mourning, she says, Western culture has become trapped in a repetitive virtual cycle of consumption and destruction; a culture which prizes the repressive and authoritarian patriarchy through its denial of the maternal influence. The ‘undead mother’ is the trace that is left behind, always threatening a revengeful return. The outpouring of public grief over the death of Princess Diana in 1997 gave rise to the trope of the people’s princess and perfect mother. The public mourning was, in Wieland’s words, an exhibition of mass hysteria and guilt – guilt about the lack of a female ideal under patriarchy and our inability to mourn. The sovereignty of the ‘law of the father’ in Western culture creates a split which is widely accepted as the order of things. The exclusion of the maternal then not only remains unchallenged but unnamed and unseen. In her book On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother, Amber Jacobs (2007) reimagines the Greek myth Oresteia with the intention of exposing and redressing this imbalance and incorporating the maternal role as an effective agent in the social and cultural law-making system. In the myth, Athena is born from Zeus’s head after Zeus swallowed her mother, Metis. Zeus cites Athena’s motherless birth as evidence of the father’s higher status. Jacobs argues that the denial of Metis is reproduced in psychoanalytic critique, with the implication being that fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the patriarchal model are similarly overlooked. Oedipal structures are deeply embedded in Western psychic and social life, and the disavowal of the mother is reinforced.

Paradoxically, adoption discourse reveals a different story about the maternal function. Central to adoption literature is the naturalisation of the mother-infant dyad and the idea that the breaking of this primary bond creates enduring emotional and developmental problems from which the adoptee must heal. In The Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier (1993) writes that ‘the severing of that connection between the adopted child and his birthmother causes a primal or narcissistic wound, which affects the adoptee’s sense of Self and often manifests in a sense of loss, basic mistrust, anxiety and depression, emotional and/or behavioural problems, and difficulties in relationships with significant others’ (p. 21. Italics in original text). Having been ‘handed over to strangers’, Verrier posits, the adoptive subject is plagued by ‘birthmother fantasies’ and abandonment trauma.

Read through the lens of trauma, the adoptive subject is presented as being bound up with the naturalised and elemental mother-child nexus, and the primal wound serves to mark the enduring pain of maternal detachment. Constituted by woundedness, the need to heal is imposed on the adoptee in the form of a commitment to return to the original mother. In the Primal Wound discourse, reunion is constructed ‘as a means for healing the adoption triad’ (p. viii). The biological mother symbolises in powerful ways the site to which the adoptee might ‘return to the imagined “before” of abandonment, where “real” belongings can be found’ (Yngvesson, 2010, p. 8).

The concept of the trauma of infant-maternal separation and ‘adoption healing’ is prevalent in both psychoanalytically informed discourse and related post-adoption practices. Adoption legislation published by the Department of Health in 2001 recognised ‘the lifelong implications of adoption’ (p. 23) and the need for services to support those affected. Andrew Cooper wrote in The Emotional Experience of Adoption: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, ‘The emotional realities of abuse, neglect and abandonment experienced by so many of the children who are placed for adoption, are almost unthinkably painful. Yet the task of trying to live lives as “ordinary” as possible in the face of such experiences, and of helping adoptive families integrate this “unthinkability” is the crucial contribution that therapists and social workers can make in this field’ (Cooper, 2008, p. xiii). There exists a growing body of adoption literature on the related themes of trauma and attachment (Archer and Burnell, 2003) and ‘triumphing over trauma’ (Goddard, 2012). As Pivnick (2009) commented, ‘Adopted children are variously viewed as having sustained multiple losses’, disruptions and attachment problems. ‘Therefore, it is thought they are in need of grief work. Since mourning requires remembering, adopted children are in insoluble trouble. How can they remember what they have never known?’ (p. 4). And in a recent article reflecting on a roundtable discussion of adoption issues that took place in New York City in 2013, Janine de Peyer noted that ‘the common denominator that runs through each adoption is the inevitable experience of loss’ (de Peyer, 2013, p. 151). As an adoptive mother, she identified with ‘adoptees’ existential feelings of alienation and identity fragmentation’, apparent to ‘anyone struggling to form a consolidated sense of self’, because the transfer from biological mother to adoptive family causes ‘a rupture in the biological eco-system shared between birthmother and infant’, and ‘on multiple incomprehensible levels the child and the birthmother are imbued with the physiological experience of dismemberment and loss, while the adoptive mother lives with the reality that her child comes from someone else’s body’ (de Peyer, 2013, p. 151). From this perspective, the adoptee’s private and social, internal and external worlds are intertwined with the motif of the abandoned child, supported by powerful social discourses about the importance of blood relations and growing up with one’s biological mother.

This idea of the wounded adoptee can be taken up critically in a number of ways. The first is by challenging the very notion of a unified and interiorised self which can be recovered. Second, I argue that this conception of a wounded self which needs to be healed is part of a wider discourse or ‘culture of trauma’, making available subject positions of victims (the biological parents and adoptee), survivors (these individuals post-reunion) and perpetrators (the state and social workers, and sometimes the adopting family). Third, by interrogating the discourse on reunion, which gained stimulus following the opening of adoption records under the 1976 Adoption Act, we find that reunion discourses imply an experience of achieving unity and merging – usually between the adoptee and biological mother – which links to wider biological-determinist and motherhood discourses, often negating the position of the biological father and adoptive family, and reinforcing notions of victimhood. And finally, I contend that these discourses strengthen normative ideas about the nuclear family form, which demand critique. The work therefore has implications for thinking more broadly about the social, drawing attention to issues of gender politics and fixed notions of kinship. One of the central aims of this book is to problematise essentialist ideas about kinship. By thinking through questions about what it means to belong to kinship groups and the implications of acquiring a biological identity, it emphasises the power of rigid narratives regarding the importance of nuclear families, and troubles conceptions of attachment, inclusion and return to origins.

Beginning with an analysis of adoption practice and subjectification, I aim to map the emergence of the wounded adoptive subject. Recalling Foucault’s conception of normalisation practices, I then explore organising principles for thinking about the self and notions of modern subjectivities in terms of psychic wounding, arguing that this is a product of trauma culture, and more broadly, of the ‘psy’ disciplines which have contributed to the invention of the traumatised self. I draw these ideas together by showing how the image of an intentional and individualised ‘wounded’ adoptive subject in search of reunion and the desire to belong to a natural family has been taken up by popular cultural discourses. I conclude this chapter by making the point that speaking of the wounded adoptive subject as distinct from the desirable non-adoptive, coherent and stable subject, located within a natural kin group, keeps the adoptee hemmed in by a rhetoric of pathologisation. In this sense, the process of reunion – specifically, finding and joining with the biological mother – is presented as a corrective technique of normalisation. I challenge these ideas by opening up the following questions: what is this essential self that may be arrived at through the process of reunion and healing? And who, or what, might be benefiting by characterising adoptive subjects and reunion in this way; what is lost, and who may be harmed? Although these questions will remain open, by inviting the reader to rethink the ways in which adoptive subjectivities and the seductiveness of reunion have been framed, I want to create a space for new ways of conceptualising adoptive subjects.

Constructing the wounded adoptive subject

In an attempt to sketch out the history of adoptive subjectivity, we need to locate the subject within the field of adoption generally, which itself has been defined by secrecy, controversy and forms of institutional power. Since emerging as a legal convention in the United Kingdom in 1926, adoption practice has shifted from being offered as a solution to childless couples promoting ideals about the traditional nuclear family form to solving the problem of vulnerable or at-risk children who are in need of homes. Triseliotis et al. (1997) identify five epochs of adoption history in Western society. First, predating the legislation of 1926, adoption was a prevalent theme in mythology and ancient tradition. In the second period, it became recognised legally. In the third period, following the Second World War, adoption became increasingly recognised as an important method for rebuilding families broken by the war. The 1950s until the mid-1960s then constituted an era in which adoption was celebrated as offering the perfect solution for childless couples. The fourth period, emerging between the late 1960s until the early 1970s, was a time in which fewer infants were available for adoption, but many children who had experienced abuse or neglect were taken into care and needed placing. These children were less easy to match with their adopting parents, due to racial or cultural differences, and many presented with particular issues such as special needs or disabilities. The focus then shifted from meeting the desires of childless couples by matching them with ‘perfect babies’ to fulfilling the welfare needs of these vulnerable children. The rise in transracial and older child adoptions further meant that it was difficult to maintain secrecy around genealogical knowledge. The fifth period, developing in the late part of the twentieth century, has symbolised a plurality of approaches, in which inter-country adoptions and adoption by single parents, same sex parents and so on, have ‘taken adoption into an often turbulent public debate and have highlighted the at times competing needs of adults seeking to adopt a child and the needs of children’ (Hindle and Shulman, 2008, p. 2). This book focuses on females who were adopted under a ‘closed’ system during the period between the 1950s and early 1980s, which is represented as a time in which adoptive families have had to negotiate their difference from non-adoptive families, due to the barriers created by stigma, secrecy, shame and denial (Pacheco and Eme, 1993; Sachdev, 1992).

According to cultural anthropologist Rachel Stryker (2013b) it was the publication of David Kirk’s (1964) seminal book, Shared Fate: A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health, that created the grounds upon which adoptive families have been defined by their differences. His work emerged at a time when the notion of ‘differentness’ was a novel idea since adoptive families had previously sought to hide their status entirely in order to avoid stigma. In his recognition of the adoptive family as an authentic kinship form, Kirk encouraged its members to ‘come out of hiding’. But in so doing, they were urged to own the doubts they each shared about ‘their own inauthenticity’ (Stryker, 2013a, p. 2). Differentiating adoptive families from non-adoptive families then reproduced notions of illegitimacy since attention was brought to the juxtaposition between socially manufactured adoptive families and their pure or natural counterparts. An increase in older children, transcultural and transracial adoptions in the years following Kirk’s publication was also connected with a rise in research portraying the culture of secrecy as emotionally damaging. Emphasis on ‘the quest for truth’ and ‘making sense of the past’ (Bennett, 2011; Keefer and Schoole, 2000) can be mapped onto a wider cultural concern with genealogy and the tracing of personal histories (Barratt, 2008). But prior to the legalisation of adoption in 1926, most adoptive families are believed to have maintained links with biological families anyway, and work by Yngvesson has suggested it was only with the promulgation of the ‘myth’ of intact and fixed adoptive family systems that ties were completely cut off (Yngvesson, 2003). In her 2003 article entitled Going ‘Home’: Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots, for instance, Yngvesson brings together two dominant stories of adoption: the story of abandonment and the story of roots. In the abandonment narrative, the adoptee is ‘set free from the past (constituted as “abandoned” or “motherless”), so that he or she can be assimilated into the adoptive family.’ And in the roots narrative or preservation story, ‘the child is imagined as part of his or her birth mother or birth nation, imagined as being constantly pulled back to that ground’ (Yngvesson, 2003, p. 8). Yngvesson’s project emphasises the tension between the desire for a unified family form and the recurrent notion of return. The idea of adoptees as dislocated and belonging nowhere is taken up in the description of adoptive subjects identifying themselves ‘as between’ families, countries, cultural and racial positions. There are many implications of framing the adoptive family and adoptive subject as existing ‘in-between’ normative ideals of undivided family networks and fully integrated subject positions, and Yngvesson’s comment on myth highlights the fantasy associated with such fixed representations.

What does demand critique, however, is the dominant discourse that propagates such accounts. Stryker contends in her paper that Kirk’s pathologising paradigm had become ‘the referendum not just on adoptive parent experience, but on adoptee experience’ (Stryker, 2013a, p. 2) and was still prevalent years after its publication. The narrative of abandonment and separation and the impossibility of adoption offering a ‘clean break’ from the maternal bond continually reproduces the idea that the adoptive subject will remain ontologically divided until she returns to her origins. For many years, theorists have focused on the maternal-infant relationship in adoption literature, particularly in relation to issues of attachment theory and identity formation. Situating adoption within a social context, a significant body of anthropological and psychoanalytic thought has detailed the importance of blood ties in building and maintaining successful family relationships. Wegar (1997) says that characterisations of kinship have always underlined blood relations. And an early article by Sants (1964) outlined the ethical debate surrounding children’s rights concerning knowledge of their biological identity. The term ‘genealogical bewilderment’ – first advanced by Wellisch in 1952 – was employed, indicating that knowledge of heredity is a significant determining factor in one’s mental well-being (Sants, 1964). This theory was echoed by March and Miall (2000), who affirms that traditionally, adoptive family ties and adoptive subjects have been constituted as ‘second best’ or ‘second choice’ in juxtaposition to those connected through blood bonds. A growing focus on the importance of blood bonds became central to the practice of understanding and facilitating reunions between adopted adults and their biological parents, events which coincided with the shift toward open adoptions in the late 1980s and changing legislation regarding contact rights.

Secrecy and truth

But even before this, critics of the closed adoption model were calling for greater openness in practice. In Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption, Carp (1998) exposed the paucity of adequate historical study of adoption, citing failed policies, poor resources in social welfare professions and, most importantly, the sealing of adoption records by tradition and law. The secrecy and stigma surrounding adoption is contrasted with the privileged position occupied by biological kinship structures in Western culture, which also centres on motherhood. Widespread stigma concerning illegitimacy, idealised expectations about family forms and limited welfare support have been cited as determining factors in persuading mothers to surrender their children, often against their will (White and Woolett, 1992, p. 39). This has led to the production of biological mothers as victims of neglect and abuse of institutional power, much like their adopted away children. Moreover, interventions surrounding the disclosure of information such as the biological parents’ biographical details and the circumstances leading to adoption meant that those who were adopted under the closed system during infancy were essentially excluded from particular modes of knowledge. Various sources point to the perceived injustice of the closed adoption system which dominated policy over the majority of the last century, and campaigns for adoptees’ rights to information were inherently linked to the opening of records and emergent events of reunion. According to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, curiosity about biological heritage on the part of the adoptee is both ‘natural and desirable’ as a precondition to finding ‘generational connectedness’:

Continued secrecy about the information concerning one’s natural parents poisons the relationship between the adoptive parents and the adopted person…. A gap in one’s sense of identity will always remain if one cannot find out this information about one’s heritage.

(Sorosky et al., 1978a, pp. 137–138)

This talk of there being a gap in one’s sense of identity illuminates some of the key ways in which adopted subjects have been constituted. The idea being that, in the main, adopted subjects grow up with a lack of knowledge about their genetic heritage, and in order to overcome this barrier would need to seek out the information con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Wounded women: The discursive construction of adoption and maternal separation trauma
• 2 Trauma culture
• Interlude 1
• Interlude 2
• Interlude 3
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index