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tion, the child will develop many questions and seize
upon many answers in his or her quest for identity.
Did my birth parents love me as a baby? If so, why did they relinquish me? Maybe they disliked me. Was there something wrong with
me? How would they feel about me today? Was I given up willingly or taken away by
force? Were my parents cruel, immoral, criminal, or defective and so unfit to be parents?
If so, does that make me the same way? Was my birth mother a prostitute? How would my
adoptive parents feel about my birth parents? Would they disapprove of them? Who are my
real parents? What makes my adoptive parents my parents? Would they really love me if
they knew I cared about my birth parents? If I really am like my birth parents, will my
adoptive parents still love me?
Might they change their minds and "unadopt" me if they decided they didn't love me?
These questions emerge in gradual fashion as the child's conceptual abilities develop.
It is hoped that the child will openly discuss these questions and the emotions attached to them (which may include grief, anger, mistrust, identity confusion, and separation anxiety). Unfortunately, a number of cultural and parental factors make the topic of adoption taboo in many adoptive families. The atmosphere within an adoptive family often discourages curiosity about adoption, enticing the child to conclude that something painful and bad (pertaining to his or her own character) is being kept a secret. Meanwhile, the child's questions remain relegated to the private domain of the imagination, where they inspire unhealthy, immature, and distorted fantasies unmoderated by reality testing or feedback from others.
In an atmosphere of denial and secrecy, even normal emotions in a growing child take on a toxic quality. For instance, all feelings of rejection may reverberate with the fantasized primal rejection by the birth parents. The child
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is also likely to feel powerless, frustrated, humiliated, and angry at the idea of having been passed along without any control over his or her own fate. If the child is inhibited from venting these thoughts and feelings as well as from obtaining any clarification or reassurance, he or she suffers an intense ambivalence toward his or her birth parents; a sense of longing, grief, anger, and mistrust often accompany such ambivalence (Lifton, 1988).
In many adoptive families, parental love is implicitly conditional:
The child is being asked to collude in the fiction that these are his only parents and to accept that his birth heritage is disposable.... Only if adopted children commit themselves fully to the identity of the adoptive clan can they have the
adoptive parents' love. Already abandoned by the birth mother, the adoptive child feels no
choice but to abandon her and, by so doing, to abandon his real self. This early, potential self
that is still attached to the birth mother is unacceptable to the adoptive parents and, therefore,
must become unacceptable to the child (Lifton,
1994, pp. 50-51).
Severely disturbed adoptees, as well as apparently well-functioning adoptees, may suffer from the implied pressure to pretend that their adoption is unimportant in defining who they are.
PSYCHODYNAMICS
With normal development, the adopted child's positive and negative images of self and others, especially parents, are gradually integrated into more realistic images. This crucial development is linked to the capacity for empathy and conscience. In less ideal circumstances, adoptees may lack the opportunity to interact with or even talk about their birth parents; their view of their birth parents cultivated in the context of their adoptive family would be constricted, secretive, and two-
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