The emotional experience of adoption : a psychoanalytic perspective

1. Creating a placement for children: opening minds and shutting doors?, John Simmonds 2. Talking about relationships and thinking about development: a psychoanalytic perspective, Robin Balbernie 3. Psychoanalytic thinking about the adoption process, Robert Fleming 4. The mermaid: moving towards reality after trauma, Caroline Case 5. On being dropped and picked up: adopted children and their internal objects, Judith Edwards 6. The emotional tasks of moving from fostering to adoption: transitions, attachment, separation and loss, Monica Lanyado 7. Just pretend, Francesca Calvocoressi 8. Becoming a 'creative couple', Molly Ludlam 9. Becoming a baby: discovering dependency in the context of a family, Ros Wass 10. Loss and recovery and adoption: a child's perspective, Debbie Hindle 11. Some Oedipal problems in work with adopted children and their parents, Pamela Bartram 12. The Lionocerous: an adopted boy's struggle to find himself, Elaine McAllister 13. A five year old's dilemmas and struggles with belonging, Savi McKenzie- Smith 14. The forever family and the ghosts of the dispossessed, Jenny Sprince 15. Conclusion Part I: Setting the Scene 1. Developing a curiosity about adoption: a psychoanalytic perspective, John Simmonds 2. Why is early development important?, Sally Wassell 3. Understanding an adopted child: a child psychotherapist's perspective, Lisa Miller Part II: Unconscious Dynamics in Systems and Networks 4. Multiple families in mind, Margaret Rustin 5. Enabling effective support: secondary traumatic stress and adoptive families, Kate Cairns 6. The network around adoption: the forever family and the ghosts of the dispossessed, Jenny Sprince Part III: Primitive States of Mind and their Impact on Relationships 7. The mermaid: moving towards reality after trauma, Caroline Case 8. On being dropped and picked up: the plight of some late-adopted children, Judith Edwards Part IV: Belonging and Becoming: Transitions 9. Playing out, not acting out: the development of the capacity to play in the therapy of children who are 'in transition' from fostering to adoption, Monica Lanyado 10. Just pretend: the importance of symbolic play and its interpretation in intensive psychotherapy with a four year-old adopted boy, Francesca Calvocoressi 11. The longing to become a family: support for the parental couple, Molly Ludlam 12. Shared reflections on parallel collaborative work with adoptive families, Francesca Calvocoressi and Molly Ludlam Part V: Being Part of a Family: Oedipal Issues 13. Loss, recovery and adoption: a child's perspective, Debbie Hindle 14. Oedipal difficulties in the triangular relationship between the parents, the child and the child psychotherapist, Pamela Bartram Part VI: Adoption and Adolescence: the Question of Identity 15. Deprivation and development: the predicament of an adopted adolescent in the search for identity, Tessa Dalley and Valli Kohon 16. Idealisation and overvalued ideas, Sheila Spensley Further Reflections 17. A cautionary tale of adoption: fictional lives and living fictions, Graham Shulman Final Thoughts