Sigmund Freud, the famous Viennese
architect of psychoanalysis, had a significant influence on modern
adoption theory and practice. So did his daughter Anna
Freud, who carried on her father’s legacy after his death
in 1939 and became well known in her own right as a developmental
researcher, a child analyst, and a theorist of “psychological
parenthood.”
Freudian ideas about unconscious desires, erotic instincts, and
critical childhood stages in the formation of adult personality
and behavior shaped the way that many parents and professionals
thought about adoption, especially its special challenges and potential
hazards. Early in the twentieth century, physicians, artists, and
feminists were in the vanguard of Americans interested in psychoanalysis.
Freud lectured at Clark University in 1909 and his translated writings
made him a more popular figure in the United States than in any
other country in the world. Freud always maintained that the American
version of psychoanalysis was hopelessly naive and ridiculously
optimistic—he called it a “gigantic mistake”—but
Americans paid little attention. They embraced psychoanalysis as
a practical means to cure a variety of ailments related to personal
adjustment, sexual happiness, and family life. Adoption was just
one example.
One starting point for Freud’s approach to development was
the belief that becoming an individual required escape, over the
course of childhood, from the absolute power and love of parents.
In order to accomplish this liberation, he argued, children invariably
called upon fantasies—acted out in play and daydreams—and
imagined that their “real” parents were much better,
kinder, and more exalted than the imperfect people who were actually
raising them. Freud called these comforting but entirely fabricated
fairy tales the “family romance.”
The fictional stories that children told themselves about their
origins mattered because they linked Freudian theory directly to
adoption.
Freud’s prototypical “family romance”—the
one he assumed virtually all children experienced and occasionally
remembered—was an adoption scenario. This scenario was developmentally
useful precisely because it remained imaginary. It allowed children
to safely express ambivalence and anger toward their parents, all
the while encouraging them to develop independent identities necessary
to becoming a healthy adults.
What worked for most children, however, caused definite problems
for children who actually were adopted. Adoptees who imagined another
set of parents were not engaged in benign falsehood. They were facing
up to reality. “There is a real element of mystery
in the illegitimate child’s background which makes such correction
by reality either impossible or unconvincing,” wrote social
worker Mary Brisley in 1939. The convergence of fantasy and real
life was the key issue for psychoanalytically inclined clinicians
in social work and psychiatry
whose interests included adoption. Viola Bernard,
Florence Clothier, Leontine Young, and Marshall
Schechter were just a few examples. Psychoanalytic ideas crowded
the adoption world from World War II on. Erik Erikson’s concepts
of “identity” and “identity crisis” were
among the most widely disseminated Freudian ideas, applicable to
adolescent development and youth movements in general as well as
adoption in particular.
Because the loss of natal parents was an all-too-real component
of adoption, the family romances of adopted children pointed toward
unanswered and sometimes unanswerable questions. Who were my birth
parents? Why did they give me away? Was there something wrong
with me? Such painful dilemmas were deeply implicated in the problematic
self-images and flawed relationships that some adoptees manifested,
and that came to the attention of clinicians. It is not surprising
that parents and professionals who took the Freudian family romance
seriously favored adoption policies and practices, such as matching,
that tried to erase natal kinship, hence concealing the emotionally
difficult truth that one set of parents had been lost and replaced
with another.
Even at the height of enthusiasm about confidentiality
and sealed records, the ritual of telling
children about their adoptions acknowledged that adoptees were different
than their non-adopted peers. Adoptees’ family romances were
more like nightmares than daydreams, and they had the potential
to produce deep sadness and distress. Knowing that they had indeed
been given away, and feeling that their very selfhood was divided
and incomplete, adoptees were at special risk for a range of psychopathologies.
Freud’s developmental theory implied that adoptees faced emotional
challenges inseparable from the adoption process itself, hence anticipating
and helping to bring into being more recent concerns with loss and
attachment.
Psychoanalytic approaches to birth
parents and adoptive parents also circulated widely in medicine,
social work, clinical psychology,
and the popular press. By midcentury, illegitimacy was widely perceived
as the result of unhappy and destructive parent-child relationships
that remained both unconscious and unresolved in adolescence and
adulthood. Seen through this Freudian lens, adoptions of children
born to unmarried women were no longer tragedies to be avoided,
but constructive acts that transferred children to adoptive parents
whose psychological (and other) qualifications were superior to
those of their neurotic birth mothers. On the other hand, the infertility
that logically motivated married couples to adopt was also suspected
of having unconscious sources that might signal neurosis or worse.
All parties to adoption, in other words, shared some form of psychological
dysfunction. After 1945, the goal of home studies and other therapeutic
practices was increasingly to guarantee that professionals trained
in psychoanalysis and other human sciences would play a crucial
managerial role in the adoption process. Even Jessie
Taft, a leading educator who disliked the orthodox Freudian
emphasis on trauma—it “implies fear of life itself”
she wrote in dismay—believed that skilled psychological interpretation
and help belonged at the heart of adoption. With the skills to explore
the emotional minefield that placement exposed, the psychological
engineers who oversaw family-formation confirmed that adoption was
abnormal while also promising to normalize it. Sigmund Freud’s
chief legacy, in adoption and elsewhere in American culture, was
to multiply deviations and simultaneously insist on their cure.
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