Réflexions cliniques autour de la mise en place des processus psychiques d’adoption

Abstract

This paper investigates the construction of kinship ties and the various stumbling blocks to their achievement. It first focuses on the adoption of young children (under three years). Parents help the child to find its place in a common history, through the integration of their own past as well as the child's. This co-creation can happen without concealing the past of the child or giving too much emphasis to those early days. There is a creation of a founding fiction, primal scene fiction, as if the parents were really behind this child and as if the child thought he could have been born of their union. A clinical example of a patient followed in psychotherapy shows that when she was a child she did not let herself be adopted even though she had received adoptive parents who seemed to be perfectly acceptable. Other clinical vignettes show that even before the arrival of the child in their home, parents may reveal difficulties, blind spots that need to be worked on in order to implement the adoption or adoptability, even before the parent-child process. Finally, the particular difficulties of not all late adoption are discussed. Clinical examples show again that not all children are adoptable and that not all parents have the capacity to foster this type of adoption requiring strength, flexibility and distancing to manage conflicts that are bound to appear. Work within a structure underpinned by adoption counseling, aims to enable and support thought about parentage among parents and their children.