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Does adoption jeopardize the mental
and emotional health of children, making adoptees especially vulnerable
to developmental, behavioral, and academic problems? Most people
connected to adoption today think it does. Most Americans agree
that adoption is a “risk factor,” according to public
opinion polls.
The belief that adoption has a psychology of its own is recent,
indebted to a tradition of controversial clinical studies linking
adoption to psychopathology. Beginning around World War II, some
mental health professionals, often influenced by psychoanalysis,
proposed that the losses associated with adoption made normal development
tricky for adopted children and stability difficult to achieve for
adoptive families. The new worries about adoption generated by psychopathology
studies added to already well established concerns that available
children were feeble-minded and
adoption unusually risky.
Psychopathology studies equated difference with damage. They helped
to transform adoption into a full-fledged object of casework and
counseling, and this was essential for the emergence of therapeutic
adoption. The rapid spread of post-adoption services, non-existent
in 1950, indicates that many parents and professionals now accept
the need for long-term, perhaps permanent, help in order to avoid
or manage adoption-related problems.
Awareness that the parties to adoption face unique psychological
challenges may well be one of the things that makes twentieth-century
adoption practices historically distinctive—as distinctive
as the psychology of adoption itself. |
Chronological
List of Psychopathology Studies
1937 |
David M. Levy, “Primary Affect Hunger,”
American Journal of Psychiatry 94 (November 1937):643-652. |
1937 |
Sydney Tarachow, “The Disclosure of Foster-Parentage
to a Boy: Behavior Disorders and Other Psychological Problems
Resulting,” American Journal of Psychiatry
94 (September 1937):401-412 |
1938 |
Edwina A. Cowan, “Some Emotional Problems Besetting
the Lives of Foster Children,” Mental Hygiene
22 (July 1938):454-458. |
1941 |
Robert P. Knight, “Some Problems in Selecting and
Rearing Adopted Children,” Bulletin of the Menninger
Clinic 5 (May 1941):65-74. |
1942 |
Elsie Stonesifer, “The Behavior Difficulties of Adopted
and Own Children,” Smith College Studies in Social
Work 13 (November-December 1942):161. |
1944 |
Houston McKee Mitchell, “Adopted Children as Patients
of a Mental Hygiene Clinic,” Smith College Studies
in Social Work 15 (1944):122-123. |
1952 |
E. Wellisch, “Children Without Genealogy—A
Problem of Adoption,” Mental Health 13 (1952):41-42. |
1953 |
Portia Holman, “Some Factors in the Aetiology of
Maladjusted Children,” Journal of Mental Science
99 (1953):654-688. |
1953 |
Bernice T. Eiduson and Jean B. Livermore, “Complications
in Therapy with Adopted Children,” American Journal
of Orthopsychiatry 23 (October 1953):795-802 |
1954 |
National Association for Mental Health, A Survey Based
on Adoption Case Records (London: National Association
for Mental Health, 1954 est.). |
1960 |
Marshall D. Schechter,
“Observations on Adopted Children,” Archives
of General Psychiatry 3 (July 1960):21-32. |
1961 |
M.L. Kellmer Pringle, “The Incidence of Some Supposedly
Adverse Family Conditions and of Left-Handedness in Schools
for Maladjusted Children,” British Journal of Educational
Psychology 31, no. 2 (June 1961):183-193. |
1961 |
Bruce Gardner, Glenn R. Hawkes, and Lee G. Burchinal, “Noncontinuous
Mothering in Infancy and Development in Later Childhood,”
Child Development 32 (June 1961):225-234. |
1962 |
Betty K. Ketchum, “An Exploratory Study of the Disproportionate
Number of Adopted Children Hospitalized at Columbus Children's
Psychiatric Hospital” (Masters Thesis, Ohio State University,
1962). |
1962 |
Povl W. Toussieng, “Thoughts Regarding the Etiology
of Psychological Difficulties in Adopted Children,”
Child Welfare (February 1962):59-65, 71. |
1962 |
Frances Lee Anderson Menlove, “Acting Out Behavior
in Emotionally Disturbed Adopted Children” (Ph.D., University
of Michigan, 1962). |
1963 |
Michael Humphrey and Christopher Ounsted, “Adoptive
Families Referred for Psychiatric Advice,” British
Journal of Psychiatry 109 (1963):599-608. |
1963 |
Jerome D. Goodman, Richard M. Silberstein, and Wallace
Mandell, “Adopted Children Brought to Child Psychiatric
Clinic,” Archives of General Psychiatry 9,
no. 5 (November 1963):451-456. |
1964 |
Marshall D. Schechter et al., “Emotional Problems
in the Adoptee,”Archives of General Psychiatry
10 (February 1964):109-118. |
1964 |
H. J. Sants, “Genealogical Bewilderment in Children
with Substitute Parents,” British Journal of Medical
Psychology 37, no. 1964 (1964):133-141. |
1964 |
H. David Kirk, Shared Fate:
A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health (New York:
The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964). |
1965 |
Frances Lee Menlove, “Aggressive Symptoms in Emotionally
Disturbed Adopted Children,” Child Development
36, no. 2 (June 1965):519-532. |
1966 |
Nathan M. Simon and Audrey G. Senturia, “Adoption
and Psychiatric Illness,” American Journal of Psychiatry
122, no. 8 (February 1966):858-868. |
1966 |
H. David Kirk, “Are Adopted Children Especially Vulnerable
to Stress? A Critique of Some Recent Assertions,” Archives
of General Psychiatry 14 (March 1966):291-298. |
1966 |
Alfred Kadushin, “Adoptive Parenthood: A Hazardous
Adventure?,” Social Work (July 1966):30-39. |
1968 |
Shirley A. Reece and Barbara Levin, “Psychiatric
Disturbances in Adopted Children: A Descriptive Study,”
Social Work (January 1968):101-111. |
1970 |
Marshall D. Schechter, “About Adoptive Parents,”
in Parenthood: Its Psychology and Psychopathology,
eds. E. James Anthony and Therese Benedek (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1970), 353-371. |
1975 |
Arthur D. Sorosky, Annette Baran, and Reuben Pannor, “Identity
Conflicts in Adoptees,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
45 (January 1975):18-27. |
1988 |
David Kirschner and Linda S. Nagel, “Antisocial Behavior
in Adoptees: Patterns and Dynamics,” Child and Adolescent
Social Work 5, no. 4 (Winter 1988):300-314. |
1990 |
David Kirschner, “The Adopted Child Syndrome: Considerations
for Psychotherapy,” Psychotherapy in Private Practice
8, no. 3 (1990):93-100. |
1990 |
David Brodzinsky and Marshall Schechter, eds., The
Psychology of Adoption (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990). |
1993 |
Nancy Newton Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding
the Adopted Child (Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1993). |
1995 |
P.F. Sullivan, J.E. Wells, and J.A. Bushnell, “Adoption
as a Risk Factor for Mental Disorders,” Acta Psychiatrica
Scandinavica 92, no. 2 (August 1995):119-124. |
1995 |
Katarina Wegar, “Adoption and Mental Health: A Theoretical
Critique of the Psychopathological Model,” American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 65 (October 1995):540-548.
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1998 |
Joyce Maguire Pavao, The Family of Adoption (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1998). |
1998 |
Jeffrey J. Haugaard, “Is adoption a risk factor for
the development of adjustment problems?,” Clinical
Psychology Review 18, no. 1 (January 1998):47-69. |
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