Filiation and adoption : interrelated thoughts

Filiation and adoption : interrelated thoughts

Alberto Eiguer^[1]

Shadow, ghost, negative

« The object’s shadow falls on the ego », said Freud (1914) about melancholy. Another shadow falls on any spouse, any parent, any family link, somebody else’s shadow or that of an ancient link : the ex-fiancé(e)s on the couple’s link ; the filial links of each parent’s  original family on the current family link; after a divorce, the family links of a first marriage on those of the recently recomposed family. It’s also the case of the link forged with the doctor who dealt with assisted medical procreation on the parent’s link with the child thus conceived and finally the link from the child to its biological parents on the link between the parents who are adopting and the child being adopted.

But many adopting families, and others, do not know that they are under the influence of one or several shadows; they act as if this didn’t exist, and then the parents are surprised by the difficulties they encounter in creating or recreating the family they dreamt of. As long as this shadow isn’t elaborated by the new family, it will remain active and will interfere.

I have seen quite a few adopting families who showed that the past « influenced » the present in no uncertain way. The Oedipus takes there new configurations. The family romance brings into it multiple characters. Third parties cling onto it. The memories of the latter are repressed, but they keep on coming back. Thrown out the door, they come back through the chimney or the window. During therapy with these families the analysis of these reluctantly faithful feelings can only be done step by step, in stages, one after the other: the representations of the various attachments appear to be linked. The ex-spouse mentions his grand-father arguing with the grand-mother who had a child from her first love who went to war and a jealous sister, etc. These third parties are like irritating witnesses who demand what’s owed to them, according to the formula on ghosts established by Abraham and Torok (1978). Sometimes they are seen as jealous of the current family’s happiness and then everything is done to ruin one’s life.

In some adopting families, people think ahead: the parents try everything to remind the child of its origins. They talk about his/her culture. They try to teach the child the customs and characteristics inherent to his culture: rhythms, music, food, even sometimes the language. They take the child to « his » country so that he can get to know those who fathered him.

I have known a case like this where the child didn’t want to hear about his culture anymore. He‘d much rather read Asterix the Gaul, draw a Rafale airplane and built a model of it. He wasn’t interested by his biological mother’s history, and this left his adoptive mother thoroughly perplexed. May be he wanted her to be more sure of herself and to establish her authority more strongly: in fact, for her to be more possessive. He’d rather she’d speak of herself and not of this biological mother who as time went by had become for him an anonymous person. Anxious parents who, on the contrary, totally refuse to let the child get into contact with his past or those who fathered him create just as many difficulties. The shadow of the other is still there, but to be able to take it into account, it is necessary to organise a conflict past/present, a conflict between thieving parents and a third parent from whom the child was forcibly taken. The child and the whole family need this “wanting” fight. Because, what really hurts is when there is no parent wanting the child. And for him the outward sign of wanting is the strong desire to possess.

In order to talk about the other and the other link, I quoted the Freudian metaphor of the object’s shadow. Another can be mentioned: the negative. The biological parent functions as a negative of the adopting parent. The idea of negative can also be applied to the couple, partner or the family the partner had before. We can often find these parallels. Negativity forms a kind of force of attraction on the link; it is in fact a reference the new members or new family must leave behind so as to let the filial or conjugal union soar. This negativity takes its strength from the fact that a previous link could have had an initiating function.

In other words, a first experience taught the child what it is to be the child of parents and to the parent the nature and meaning of filiation and to a partner what is a couple. The adults knew this because they lived it or observed it during their childhood. But now it is a direct experience. In each case, they have understood how a couple or a filial link functions and this in spite of the difficulties  endured and dissention which may have wounded and while still admitting that the happiness brought by the new relationship is undeniable.

The three metaphors of the shadow, ghost and negative help us to better place some of the stakes and to recognise why adoptive families meet difficulties, which are made worse by the need to find solutions quickly. Why quickly? I don’t know.   Maybe a mix of castration and the fear that a bad mother can come back and claim the child, that the « kidnap » is discovered. The fear of failing the family ideals as soon as the slightest problem emerges. The other, omnipresent, becomes a threat.

The adoptive or biological link is nevertheless a filial link. Talking about adoption leads us to study it. The filiation link is « a direct descendants link between those who father and are fathered », is the definition given by Le Robert dictionary (1957, p. 14). The affective attachment which links them is unique. But the whole fabric of the filial is not just made of filial. Affiliation also plays an important role there.

Affiliation

The Romans called familia anybody who lived under the same roof. This situation made me wonder about the interest of thinking that the home defines an area where those who live there are part of the same groupal whole linked by filiation and family links; part of this whole might be close relatives, friends or even pets. I took as a basis the  concept of  cohabitation link (Bourdieu, 2001), and noticed that it can make up for the lack of blood link between parent and child, as is shown in adoption, in recomposed families, in homoparentality and in families who used assisted medical procreation (MAP). This cohabitation link can reinforce the affiliation link between family members and contribute to the strengthening of new attachments as well as helping inserting people into parenthood  (helps cohesion and confirms the feeling of belonging, both notions involved in the affiliation process).

Even with pets, the relation to the master is reinforced through cohabitation; the affiliation process helps with the feeling they are part of the family. (A. Eiguer, 2004.)

In the case of adopting families, the everyday life reinforces family links through affiliation helping the integration of non-blood relatives to the family. This everyday life is made of joys and sadness, contacts, meals eaten together, pleasant evenings, games and conversations, going out and visiting people, troubles shared, care and attention shown and solidarity in hardship. With the family, we talk about things, about the past; we mention meaningful characters from childhood or the family tree. Each repeated gesture reinforces this background. We can understand why so many children always ask for the same tale to be told and retold.

The filial link rests at least in part on the affiliation, an attachment which harks back to the group and its dynamic. Complicities appear; supports are reinforced, mobilised by the feeling that the unconscious carries desires, fantasy and affects. The child builds his entry in a filiation with his insertion into the household habitat, carrying within himself the traces of belonging to a family. In the case of a family who had adopted two boys, the parents had insisted on telling them about their past life in minute details. Little by little the children felt close to this past. Therapy started as they were reaching puberty, 12 and 13, to help them with schooling issues. The father and the mother were from a foreign country ruled by a dictatorial regime. The father was a smuggler, meaning that he would help people who wanted to emigrate go clandestinely through the borders. He also smuggled goods. He went to jail for it. He liked talking about his illegal activities and entertained his audience explaining the tricks he used. Delighted, the children always asked for more details about their father’s prowess. The story of his own escape took pride of place amidst all these stories. The children loved this story and never tired of hearing it. They knew that it had been dangerous, but the rapture they experienced when listening to this tale induced in them a strange denial.

During a session, one of the children explained that he had occasionally boasted to his friends and sometimes adults about this. He said he was proud that his father had been a smuggler, that he’d got the better of the police and custom men several times, and then « endangered » his country’s government. It was like « My father is a hero! » But the mother looked ashen when she heard this during the session. She explained she had felt various contradictory feelings. Although she was happy to see that the children showed themselves to be close to their father, she was afraid that the facts might become known this way and that they‘d get into trouble again. The shadow of the past! It was possible that the children could place themselves more in their history – she said -. They seem to understand and like their parent’s past and choice of lifestyle. But at the same time, there was a kind of identification with the father’s activities which had actually been chosen through necessity. The mother added that she didn’t think this could be something to be proud of. She would have preferred them to be more aware of the suffering this had entailed.

The younger child said that he didn’t’ see anything wrong with becoming a smuggler if the opportunity arose. His brother teased him: « You like selling your rotten DVD’s at a high price. You like cheating even those you call your best friends. »

Myself, I was thinking that because of their pride their father appeared to be like a proper villain; he would carry this smuggler’s job in his blood.

This logic can’t help reminding us of adoption’s logic. Sterile parents generally adopt through need in the same way that this father became a smuggler when faced with no other choice. We could add an ideological dimension to the smuggling immigrants side of it. It was as if the boys were saying: « If you refuse to think that you became a smuggler because you liked it, you can’t tell us that being a biological or an adopted child is the same thing. »

It appeared there that the new adoptive filiation was going in a direction the parents hadn’t planned on, at least consciously. Especially as they had decided to go into exile to start afresh and leave behind their clandestine and marginal life. The father didn’t think he was a born villain, the proof being that he hadn’t taken up smuggling again and even had stopped all contact with people doing it. In France, he had studied to become a physiotherapist, and was happy with his choice. But the children were almost hooked on these tales, which had various ramifications and included people they knew and family members. In reality the eventful life of smugglers ran through the history of the original families and their members. They had their own stories so you could identify them and know their personality better.

Because of the way the father talked about his clandestine life, the boys had intuited that he enjoyed it on a certain level and that this lifestyle choice corresponded to a hidden vocation. To prove this was more important for them than revealing a secret: it was concluding that the father considered them as his children. This was partially highlighted during a session.

Usually, when one is adopted, we are supposed to integrate into the parent’s past with their dark and light aspects, their ancestors, their habits, ethos etc.

The idea of affiliation, just as the intersubjective link’s, enlightens us: the filial is determined by reciprocity. To be part of a filiation, is to be curious to know the other, to be involved in his life beyond his choices and taste, to be concerned by his difficulties, even if each person finds freedom and independence precious. The other doesn’t necessarily asks to be concerned for him, but it is an unconscious process, an involvement directly linked to finding oneself opposite the other and interacting with him.

Thinking about adoption: considerations about traumas and narration

Adoption is a time of crisis and integrating the new member into the family implies a disruption, a micro-trauma, although adoption can help heal other wounds (sterility, etc.).

To study the impact of this trauma on the family, it might be interesting to take into account the family’s singularity. Let’s talk about trauma in general.

Normally, any trauma disturbs with more or less important repercussions. It is not unusual for a child to doubt the identity of one or the other of his relatives or to reject it. With victims, the shock of the trauma affects various areas : the affect, with fear, confusion and inconsolable suffering ; thoughts, overcome with excitement, troubled and disorganised ; memory traces which cannot flow well anymore ; narcissism, weakened and changed by the appearance  of  vacuoles of the ego (Abraham and Torok, 1978 ; A. Eiguer, 2009), which are the witness of what is unrepresentable, in other words the changes of understanding following the spoken interdiction to think about the perpetrator, if he was the reason for the trauma and used threats. Whether the cause of the trauma are within or outside the family, the consequences on it as a whole are still significant: fantasy becomes impossible. The family balance is shattered. These problems create in their turn decisive effect even a long time after the event.  But we get over a trauma through and with the other, identifying with him, his sympathy, and his tenderness.

The narrative has also a function. The victim talks about the facts and tries to understand what has happened. According to the perspective opened by Ferenczi (1931, 1933), the psychical defence mechanisms should not necessarily be seen negatively ; they prove to be useful, even if it is temporary, and last only as long as the shock is still painful. Why not let ourselves deny, split, rationalise and turn upside down the meaning of things? These defences sometimes open up a way towards recovery. Why ? Even if things are not clear, the subject can start with an interpretation of the event either from a single point of view, or wrongly, but it is already thinking, reasoning, deduction. He is adamant his version of the event is right. Ferenczi insists on the split necessary to separate memory from experience and what has been lived from the rest of the being. He uses the term « fragmentation » for this useful defence. The shock being overcome, the subject will find unity again and then he will remember, talk about the experience, will link it, knead it , handle it , rebuild it and transform it.

Ferenczi (1933) also says that denial and split can also be shared by the adult perpetrator of the trauma and the witness. The adult will render commonplace the prejudice done, if he was the perpetrator, or the neglect, physical or affective, if he ignored the needs of a child. He seems to ignore the specific psychology of children who can’t follow when he uses « the language of passion ». Ferenczi implies that this denial finds an echo with the victim’s, thus creating a unity in denial.

In other words, denial is harmful if collectively reinforced. Its presence clearly suggests the need for a gradual elaboration of the suffering, and above anything else, the strengthening of self-esteem for the victim of the trauma. It is the situation of passivity which seems to complicate matters: passive for having suffered and wanting to be comforted. In the case of the family mentioned above, the children feel as if they were an active part of their adoptive parent’s past. We notice that this illusion is functional; because denial is not much in evidence, it contributes to the construction of filiation.

Projection also appears to be an interesting mechanism. Its role in the thought process, the use of intuition and deduction to which thought is associated, the opening of an « how to see the world » viewpoint and systematisation integrating various empiric observations deserves our attention. Several researchers, including Freud (1912), have looked into well-known area of building systems of interpretation in primitive societies regarding natural phenomenon they couldn’t control. These researchers have recognised that these systems can be positive.

Why not have explanations which might calm our anxieties? The disorganising results of the disturbance being overcome, the subject can develop new reasoning, ask questions they didn’t used to wonder about.

Thoughts have indisputable links with narration: the story we create enables us to forge new hypothesis, and to shake our own convictions. What frequently occurs is that different versions of the event succeed one another, even if they are contradictory, when talking about the perpetrators of the trauma, the witnesses, and the victims. They are collectively built by the family. We will tell ourselves that the person whom we thought had saved the victim was ,in reality, an accomplice of the assailant, the assailant being himself a victim, etc.

In the history of psychoanalysis, the positive role of defence, claimed by Ferenczi has been subjected to a kind of repression until H. Kohut (1971) who, noticing its narcissistic advantages, gave it a new name: offsetting mechanism. The defence tries to compensate for a lack, recent or not, of love, safety, or consideration. The adult (s) in charge of care is responsible for the failure. This definition corresponds to the ferenczian approach, the positive function of the defence being  important in proportion with the lack of adult care towards the traumatised child. The defence was previously understood in relation to instinct whose effects it was trying to neutralise. In the kohutian understanding, the link parent-child is put on the foreground.

This reformulation is contemporary with reconsideration of narration in rebuilding the past: the narrative supports memory and gives it plausibility and not the opposite so much anymore – that is to say the hypothesis which is usually proffered: we are supposed to look for the one and only truth.

Each successive version explaining what happened shores up the narration and enables it to repair itself. Inasmuch as the wound is being perceived as an indignity we can’t control, the narrative allows us to see ourselves as the subject, the maker, the actor of the event. It is also an attempt to get closer to the myth, a bit nearer with each new version, until we manage to transform the shameful and banal into valiant deeds. « If it happened to me, it is because it’s fate. If it happened to others, to neighbours or members of my family, I’d feel in good company. » to become a hero, is not to stand alone anymore but « to write myself into the family destiny. All my people are there, for generations and  generations ». (Cf. the case of the family mentioned above, where we notice the creation of a myth of the heroism of the father, thus trying to solve the uncertainties of the adoptive filiation.)

In conclusion

The family plays a very specific role in narrative reconstruction. If each of its members suffered the trauma on the same level, the reconstruction by narrative will be done collectively. If one member of the family is more affected than the others, all will contribute. If the perpetrator of the aggression is a family member, then third parties, witnesses or people from outside the family will be essential for this work.

In each case and specially in adopting families, the myth of the child saved because he’s been chosen is present and each partner of the repairing process sticks, in his own way, to this myth. The healer, who already has his own family myth, will also match his gestures to the gesture expected by the victim and the family. The healer’s myths echo the family’s myths.

The two examples given enable us to observe the interest of the narrative in the adoption process; it has the function of restoring and tightening the filial links. In the first family, the child was asking his fragile parents to talk about their life; he was specifically interested in French comic heroes.

The second case shows that to have parents and children adapt to each other, the narrative holds a capital place in the identification of the other and that, once he is recognised properly, in one’s own identification. When something is not possible or allowed, we can let ourselves break the law and admit we found pleasure in it. The narrative doesn’t always seem to tell the truth, but it shows the deeper truth of the subjects. Being so clear-sighted and apt at discovering mysteries, adopted children can help to win back each person’s authenticity.

The adopted child could well say: « Tell me your story, even if it is not accurate. My job is to find its (your ) truth. »

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References

Abraham N., Torok M. (1976) L’écorce et le noyau, Paris, Flammarion.

Bourdieu P. (2000) Les structures sociales de l’économie, Paris, Le Seuil.

Eiguer A. (2004) L’inconscient de la maison, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2008) Jamais moi sans toi. Psychanalyse des liens intersubjectifs, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2009) « Narcissisme familial », Revue internationale de psychanalyse de couple et de famille, N° 2, versions en français, anglais et espagnol www.aipcf.net

Ferenczi S. (1931-2) « Réflexions sur le traumatisme », tr. fr. OC IV, Paris, Payot, 1982, 139-147.

Ferenczi S. (1933) « Confusion de langues entre l’adulte et l’enfant », tr. fr. in OC IV, Paris, Payot, 1982.

Freud S. (1912), Totem et tabou, tr. fr. Gallimard, 1977.

Freud S. (1914) Deuil et mélancolie, tr. fr. in OC XII, Paris, PUF.

Kohut H. (1971) Le self, tr. fr. Paris, PUF, 1974.

Le Robert (1957) P

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[1] Psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, holder of an Habilitation to direct research in psychology (Université Paris V), director of the review Le divan familial, President of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.

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