CHAPTER 11
SOMETIMES A FATAL QUEST... LOSSES IN ADOPTION
DAVID KIRSCHNER
The quintessential adoptee, to quote an
adoptee friend of mine, author/ psychologist Betty Jean Lifton
(1988), was Oedipus. Had Freud been an adoptee, he would have
known that the pivotal issues in Oedipus' complex were abandonment
and loss, a need to reconnect with genetic roots and buried, dissociated
adoptee rage. Oedipus' search for his past evolved into a fatal
quest, in large part, because he was not told the facts of
his birth that Laius, not Polybus, was his biologic father and
Jocasta his birth mother. He had voyaged to Delphi to seek the
truth from the Oracle, but was rewarded only with a cryptic message,
that if he returned to his own land he would kill his father and
marry his mother. The fact that he had been adopted by Polybus
after being abandoned by Laius was kept from him, as the truth
of their birth is often kept from most adoptees. The consequence
was parricide and incest. We are left to consider the possibility
that on a deeply unconscious level, Oedipus knew exactly what
he was doing when he killed his father and took his mother to
the marital bed: he was both taking revenge for having been abandoned
as an infant and reconnecting with his genetic past.
Abandonment and loss are core issues in adoption.
Loss of the birth mother is a primal wound, says adoptive
mother/author Nancy Verrier (1993), likely no less profound than
loss of significant relationships through death, separation or
divorce. In adoption, however, there is also a loss of
origins, loss of identity and loss of a completed
sense of self. All members of the adoption triad experience profound
loss. Birth parents lose their children, adoptive parents lose
their dream of a child they wanted to conceive, and adoptees lose
their birth families. Unlike other situations of traumatic loss,
the adoptee's need to grieve is too often not validated
by society, or understood by the adoptive family.
Speaking of adoption loss, Jean Paton, the grandmother of adoption reform (Paton, 1968) wrote me, when she was age 82:
I believe that there are two traumas in the average adoption life history. One relates to the rejections one has received in the search. The other
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