Identidad e identificación en la adopción

Identity and identification in adoption^[1]

Anna Maria Nicolò^[2]

As a child and adolescent psychoanalyst who has also been working for many years  with couples and families, I enjoy a very stimulating field of vision not only on intra-psychic but also on micro-social events.

We see couples who wish to obtain international adoption, which in the past few years has been a skyrocketing phenomenon, couples who turn to IVF, reconstituted families made up of two divorced partners with children from both previous marriages and families with emigration problems, all these allow us to reflect upon new issues, and at times, lead us to new pathologies that we do not very well know how to approach as they upset our traditional ideas of marriage, parenting, the maternal and paternal function, filiation and even identity.

Today the limitations posed by reality are certainly fewer than those experienced in the past. On one hand this tends to stimulate omnipotence, while, on the other, makes us feel confused. We have contact with uncanny situations more frequently today than in the past, they are quite different from our traditions and require a more profound and faster rate of change.

Could all this foster defensive splitting processes, rather than repression and lead to fragmentation, doubling or identity disorders?

These configurations challenge the elaboration function of groups and individuals because micro-social changes particularly affect groups before becoming objects of individual elaboration.

I will now illustrate a clinical case regarding Beatrice and her daughter Ariela. These two cases have been treated in parallel by myself and by a colleague and, as will be seen, various mirroring themes emerge from the two.

When I met Beatrice, who was referred to me by another analyst and who had had a consultation with her adopted daughter, she was 40 years old. I will not dwell on the details of the life of this brave and intelligent woman, but I will mention some features that resonate with her daughter’s experiences.

For political reasons, her mother’s family had fled from the East to Italy when Beatrice was five. Serious financial problems had characterized the patient’s otherwise happy youth in a family where all members spoke other languages in addition to their own which was a result of a refined upbringing. Beatrice and her family remember that period as a myth-fantasy of an aristocratic and princely family who suddenly found fabulous riches  after they had moved to an Eastern country, but lost just as suddenly –  the real truth – due to political persecution. They remember how afraid their mother was of getting lost on the boat when they crossed the sea for Italy, a completely unknown country although it was her family’s country of origin.

Beatrice’s father was a rather manic man with grandiose fantasies aimed at creating an allegedly noble past that contrasted with his then current occupation in trade. Beatrice was brought up with somewhat eccentric habits and with contradictory views on the role of women, who on one hand were expected to be self-sufficient and well organized, while on the other, were demeaned in favour of males. This was particularly true with her brother who was later on affected by serious depression and died in mysterious circumstances that pointed towards suicide.

After various vicissitudes, Beatrice got married in late adolescence because she was pregnant, but her parents forced her to abort. This extremely painful early experience left indelible marks, but was useful in helping her separate from her contradictory and frustrating family and led her to be adopted by her very young husband’s family, in particular by his mother, who had a structuring function for her.

After a few years she left this adolescent relationship and, following a period without a man in her life, she began the fundamental love relationship in her life.

Her second husband, Giovanni, lived in the East for professional reasons and was very well educated and came from an aristocratic family. After having married him via  proxy that he mailed to her, she joined him abroad and helped him in his work. She soon started to settle in that distant country; its habits, culture and religion. She learned the language and became expert with it.

The couple then decided to adopt a child because she never became pregnant and the husband too had some reproductive problems. The adoption possibility soon became an element of conflict in their marriage as quite a few areas of conflict emerged that had previously been masked by the heroic investment of the first few years.

Giovanni wanted to adopt a preadolescent boy who appeared to have some handicap. Beatrice was insistent on a very beautiful little girl who seemed less deprived and inhibited than the other available children. Luckily she won.

From this point on, Giovanni’s depressive symptoms emerged with even greater clarity. They was also evidence of Beatrice’s unconscious choice of partner. By choosing that particular husband, Beatrice had materialized the grandiose aristocratic fantasy that was the basis of her family history and, which, at the same time, continued the relational model and the manic reparation that had characterized her relationships with her ailing father and brother. One of the relevant elements of Beatrice’s analysis was the working through of a kind of family myth that had shaped her life, the extraordinary and alleged aristocratic origin of both her father’s and mother’s side of the family. For example, she used to say that her father had sold one of the last flats he still owned in order to buy a set of silver cutlery that was alleged to have belonged to the Tzar. She struggled to question the validity of her father’s decisions, but she was also helped by the fact that, after his death, the purchased goods turned out to be forgeries.

A long stretch of her analysis was dedicated to the elaboration of her mourning for not having been able to conceive a child and understand the reasons that had led her to adopt a little girl, in addition to the current difficulties in her relationship with her daughter. She could clearly see her anger for having felt that her femininity had been denied by her parents: denied by her father despite her efforts at becoming the efficient son that her brother had never managed to be, denied by her mother whose rejection and jealousy became ever more clear and despite Beatrice’s moving efforts at being accepted.

In a dream in the second year of treatment, she was in a foreign country where she found an oddly duck-shaped Easter egg and thought about giving it to her mother. She had only 50 thousand lire and she bought the egg although it cost thirty-five thousand. She associates thirty-five to the age she was when she adopted Ariela, and the duck to her mother who had always been somewhat thick-headed and never understood anything.

To give a daughter to her mother, but not being able because she was obliged to adopt one was one of her main torments. In this dream we also see her difficulty in accepting her daughter as a separate and different person. For her mother, Ariela still seems like a promise that cannot hatch, but obviously all this could also be referred to the transference: in this foreign and unknown country that was represented by the analytical setting she risked contacting parts of her self that had not yet been born and were as thick as a duck egg. In a game of projective identifications we see her inability to identify with her daughter, a foreigner both in reality and fantasy, onto whom she projects all her difficulties.

In addition to her obvious anxiety for having taken her daughter from her true parents, Beatrice held a fantasy that Ariela in truth had noble origins. We know how frequent this fantasy is in adopting parents. In this case, however, the fantasy portrayed an organized and articulated character: mystery surrounded the girl’s date and place of birth. It seemed that Ariela had been found crying in a

market place wearing posh clothes. Her adopting parents attributed her habits to a previous grand upbringing.

These fantasies co-insided with the fantasies that Ariela  brought to session. In fact, she had started treatment because she had found it very difficult to learn Italian and had relational problems at school. She continued speaking the aristocratic language of her home country, as she did when she happened to be abroad and in her grandmother’s family.

Beatrice talked at length of the actual evidence that she thought proved Ariela’s princely origin and was upset when she told me that Ariela herself held and cultivated this fantasy.

The girl spent a lot of time drawing matryoshka-like dolls, one inside the other.

In both the mother’s and the daughter’s sessions we saw that giving up their original language, that was considered aristocratic and unusual in Italy, corresponded to giving up their fantasies of a grandiose self, and, with it, the possibility of accepting their real identity as experienced as trivial or commonplace.

The issue of a double identity, one hiding the other, characterized Ariela, who considered herself alternatively as an unreachable princess or as a very poor child who  everybody rejected.

It is interesting to mention a drawing Ariela made in a session that remained as a central element of her analysis.

The drawing is a sort of cartoon that represents a crying broom. The speech bubble, in Ariela’s original language says: “My name is broom. I am unhappy because I am a broom, but I would like to be a prince, so that a princess would dance with me and would marry me”. In the drawing there is also a royal couple wearing a crown and a dress with a train. On one side, a little girl wearing a crown. In the bottom corner a bubble in Italian says, “it is the end of the world and of the earth”.

A few months later Ariela draws a girl with a huge face lying near her and from the girl’s mouth a bubble says, “I dreamed I had a broom instead of a prince”.

In this period, in addition to her difficulties at school and with her school mates, Ariela treats her parents, her therapist and others with cold disdain, haughtily. In and outside the sessions she looks like the impersonation of a princess.

Another theme that was present in this period is the saga of the little mermaid. She manically draws, erases and redraws a little mermaid, queen of the Mediterranean Sea.

The organization of these fantasies (the fantasies of princely origin, are quite frequent at this age), however, they showed worrying aspects due to their repetition and led her to be isolated from the rest of the world. On the one side, they were useful defences against the depressive anxiety of being nasty and ugly, like a broom and for this reason of having been rejected by her parents. At the same time, they hid and defended her from her fear of being expelled by her adoptive parents if she did not conform to their magical and grandiose expectations.

The coincidence of the family myth, the mother’s grandiose fantasy and Ariela’s family novel determined the possibility of her falling into a fantasized, pseudo-delusional situation that originated from the collusion between the family’s fantastic world and the organization of the individual mind that is frequent in such situations.

Comment

I think that this case allows for a reflection not only on the issues that derive from the clinical aspects, but in particular, on some frequent problems that arise in international adoptions.

Some reflections are obvious and well known to the majority of us, such as the widely documented fact that emigration affects both individual identity and family identity. Stability in space and continuity in time, are, in fact, basic elements for establishing a sense of identity.

Emigration, the arrival in a new world, and adoption, especially of children of a different race, culture and religion, imply experiences that are similar to those of birth, that may be catastrophic or depressive, according to the prevalence of continuity with, or of change from previous experiences. I am referring to the birth of a new aspect of the self and the fears that it entails, but also to the fear of a traumatic birth. For example, in Ariela’s case, the little mermaid may represent her fear of being born as a woman as well as her fear of contacting reality and giving up the magical world of the omnipotent narcissistic fusion that is represented by the sea. The prevalence of catastrophic birth experience entails the risk of developing a paranoid system, while the prevalence of depressive experiences entails the risk of progressively depleting the true part of the self until one is lost (sometimes catastrophic birth experiences also entail  the fear of the end of the world, at least one’s original world, as can be seen in Ariela’s first drawing with the bubble, “it’s the end of the world and of the earth”). In the case of a catastrophic birth, a child may reject its parents, but more often the parents may reject the child and even if they don’t expel it, they can consider it as a potentially hostile stranger as in the famous equation that Freud outlined in “Negation”, what is evil, what is outside the Ego and what is external are identical in the beginning (Freud S. 1925, p.199).

But there is also another instance when experiences of mourning and depression  prevail, such as non-elaborated depression in a

sterile couple, but even more frequently, depression in the parents and child because neither represents the other’s ideal.

If an adopted child is afraid of being rejected because he/she feels inadequate, unable etc., they run the risk of adapting to the other in an adhesive complying way that leads them to forget their roots and to forget the true part of their self and their needs.

But one specific issue represents the specificity of adopting parents and makes their parenting function especially difficult.

These parents have suffered the loss caused by their sterility and they mourn not only their unborn children but also a part of themselves that they consider damaged and destructive of their self, their partner, the couple and the family and its generational continuity.

Sterility is often a psychosomatic disorder based on a difficulty in thinking, symbolizing and representing various primitive conflicts that concern both the individual’s internal world and the deep couple tie, that mutual fantasizing between partners that is the basis of their affective functioning.

The failure in conceiving offspring becomes tragic because the primary complex questions that lead to “somatic prohibition to procreate” accumulate with the narcissistic breakdown of omnipotence.

An adopted child needs to be affiliated, since it is not generated from sexual intercourse but from a legal deed that, in depriving maternity of its origin in sexuality, deprives the body of the mother and father of their affective side and therefore deprives the child of its parents. This situation becomes especially difficult because these parents also need to be able to tolerate and contain an additional loss, that of the adopted child. This excess of necessary elaboration in the parents and child alike may cause serious problems in the family as a whole and in each family member. Indeed, I believe that it is from this very knot, from this inescapable crossroads, that all pathologies arise, such as the rejection of the child, its expulsion or, at the opposite side of the scale, depression or adaptation or, in the worst scenario, the colonization of the child’s mind by the parents. In both cases, what is evident is the disowning of the other, strange, because other than oneself.

The parents who reject the child who was temporarily assigned to them before the actual adoption, have not created an inner space inside themselves for accepting the real and fantastic stranger. The child is often compared to an ideal child, who obviously does not exist and is rejected in the very needy, dirty, excited and exciting aspects that cause concern and fear in the parents  because of their projective identification.

But starting from this crossroads, the child too protests, its provocation to the new world and in the worst cases that adaptation that Winnicott feared could split and damage the self.

We can see that some people turn into impersonations when they try at all costs to belong to cultures that are distant for historical and internal reasons, when they try to achieve what Winnicott called an extreme identification with society, with a total loss of the sense of one’s self and importance (Winnicott, 1974). In the child, inhibition, blocks and cognitive difficulties are only a few of the many symptoms of this disorder. Symptoms that are present in Ariela’s case and that I have seen in many cases of international adoption where the traditional split between affective development, early sexual maturation and cognitive development accumulates together with the question of a pseudo-inhibition of cognition or personality and the inhibition of representational abilities.

In the most serious and extreme cases we see terrible situations where the couple from the very start, wants a child in order to make it the container of destructive, split off and projected parts of their own selves. They have experienced sterility as a narcissistic wound and for them the focus is on having-owning a child rather than performing a transformation that would turn them into parents.

The fragility of the self of these children and the early traumatic events that characterize their lives expose them to the risk of being easily colonized by the pathological and alienating identifications of their adoptive parents, by the raw non-elaborated events that dominate the trans-generational transmission in these families. These cases repeat the complex multifaceted organization that characterizes the emergence of a psychotic functioning in natural or adopted children.

But we may wonder whether the emotional experience that generates these experiences does not in some way remind us of what takes place in a natural birth. Both the natural and the adopted child and its parents need mutual narcissistic cathexes, but, in Kaës’s words, “this first experience of illusion of narcissistic coincidence” must be immediately disconfirmed and disillusioned and this will be the first challenge. In fact, if elaborated and contained, disillusionment will foster the appearance of a sense of alterity and the recognition and acceptance of the other as similar and alien at the same time. This complex and well known process does not only concern the mother, father and child but also the family as an inter- and trans-generational entity, a family that is characterized by a syntax of emotions, by a specific language, by a story, a daily practice that the child needs to learn in order to belong to and identify with the family. A family as a fantastic organism and in Meltzer’s words, a context for emotional learning in which each one of us identifies and whose mental and emotional functioning is a part of our internal world.

Identity and adoption

When an adopted child arrives in a family, two worlds and two stories meet, the one brought by the child and the other of the parents and their nascent family, stories that convey both personal and group identities.

The concept of identity, unlike that of identification, does not play an important theoretical role in Freud’s work and is related to the features of a group, people or a large family in the speech he made to the Jewish association B’nai-B’rith (Freud 1926).

Further, for later psychoanalytical authors, the concept of identity remained ambiguous and questionable showing its double intrapsychic and interpersonal nature. For Erikson, for example, identity is the outcome of work carried out by the Ego in relation to the group to which one belongs. For the Grinbergs, three integration bonds keep the sense of identity in a process of constant interaction. The first one is spatial integration, distinguishing the self from the non-self and keeping the cohesion of the various parts of the self and differentiation from the objects.

Temporal integration establishes continuity between different representations of the self over time. Lastly, social integration provides the sense of belonging through the relationships between self and objects that are regulated by the processes of both projective and introjective identification.

The disruption of the spatial bond produces mental states of disorganization, confusion and depersonalization that are accompanied by primitive persecutory anxiety.

The disruption of the temporal bond causes anxiety and confusion between memories of the past and current times. The disruption of the social bond generates depressive anxiety and fear of not belonging, with the loss of the feeling of having a role or a place in the community or family.

These distinctions as applied by the Grinbergs to emigration are also useful in part in the question of international adoption, not only because the child suffers disruption in spatial, temporal and social integration, but also because similar experiences can be seen in the parents and family that is faced with the stranger, the child, especially if the child is of a different race, religion or skin colour.

I don’t need to remind you how uncanny (unheimlich) a new born child is in general, and an adopted child is in particular, especially when foreign, also because in concrete reality it allows one to externalise that foreign and different part of ourselves, in front of our own eyes, that each one of us carries inside. As Freud says, something new that refers to the image of yourself as other than yourself, different from what you thought you were, losing the illusion of the uniqueness of the Ego.

The question of the uncanny stranger evokes anxious ghosts in both the child and the parents who will enact basic unresolved conflicts that have been kept at bay up until that moment. This was the case of an adult patient of mine who reacted to the adoption of her first child during the trip back from Brazil to Italy with serious obsessive and phobic symptoms and panic attacks, that on the one hand repeated her mother’s obsessive phobic modes, and on the other, her own anxious fantasies of having taken a baby from its mother and her fear of facing a dangerous part of herself that she had been able to control up until then, and which was probably related to the madness of her mother that she had never wanted to acknowledge. We could also discuss here, although it might take us too far, the suitability of the term identity that is frequently used clinically especially in serious pathologies or in adolescence. A more pertinent and respectful term is the one used by Raymond Cahn, who talks of “becoming a subject”, “building one’s own subjectivity”, outlining a life long process, that does not start in adolescence but finds one of its basic moments in adolescence. A continuous, evolving process through which the subject invents himself through progressive binding, unbinding and rebinding both in his internal economy and his interpersonal relations.

This terminology might be preferable to the term identity for various reasons. First of all because we are not talking of a single identity for each individual, but of many versions of the self that each of us carries within, and enacts according to his bonds, while maintaining continuity, constancy, adequacy and integration. But the term identity with its root “idem” always and only seems to refer to what is identical, a rather theoretical and ideal than real and everyday concept.

However, both if we want to use the term identity or if we prefer to use other terms, such as subjectivation or personation (the latter used by Resnick), we always refer to the subjective appropriation of our self, of our personal history in time and – more importantly – in relation to the Other, the other with a capital O that defines us and that we define. And this will also be the developmental task of an adopted child in an adopting family and not only in its biological family.

Adoption and the double

Returning to our question and our case histories, we can also see that this uncanny stranger can cover a void (Ariela’s matryoshkas that might represent repeated screens, masks of a true self, that can never be found) but immediately refers us to the issue of the double inside and outside ourselves.

These children are constantly confronted by a double: double country, double language, double culture, double birth, double parents, double families etc.

In Ariela’s case the double was clear in her fantasy of an aristocratic birth and therefore a hidden aristocratic identity, fantasies that colluded with her mother’s fantasies and with the family myth. All this led her to relational difficulties and learning problems, that probably hid her difficulties in symbolizing and elaborating her own story. Her difficulty in learning a language, which is a frequent pathology in these children, is related to the core issue of accepting and learning the emotional and cognitive language of their new family and parents.

Another patient who I described elsewhere, Alarico, also suffered from this type of double identity due to secrets surrounding his birth. He often dreamed about this question and  told me that in order to get away from and leave his family he needed to change his last name and that there were people who had told him his name was different from that of his family (Nicolò, 2002).

It is clear that, here, I am not talking about the original double, background of any psychic fact as described by Baranès, but rather of the defensive construction born as psychic organizer, frequent in adolescence, that locks an identity stalemate in because it cannot find a solution. This double is initially built to access alterity, subjectivation, but then it freezes in an unending impasse where choice is impossible because it would become the negation of an inescapable and constitutive part of the self and of history.

From which couple of parents do I come from? Which of their stories establishes me? Which of the two personas defines me? Where do I belong? In a constant back and forth of indecision between the “place of residence” and the place of belonging, to use the beautiful terms chosen by Bolognini in his poetical book Come vento – come onda (Like the wind – like a wave), where one place is confused and interchanged with the other.

This is the central core that we often see in adopted adolescents, for whom adolescence as an organizing process poses the basic question of subjectivation, a stage and a process that cannot be bypassed, both for its phase-specific features and because “natura non facit saltus.”

We often see that all these issues, hidden or avoided during childhood, re-emerge with adolescence and exacerbate the phasespecific developmental stages. During adolescence, for example, the separation from the parents and from the infant world becomes much more difficult because to abandon or change the identification with the current parents might entail the risk of returning to the relationship with the former parents and to earlier identifications with them or with an often traumatic and unknown past, as if the adolescent felt forced to choose rather than to articulate and integrate.

Myth and history

A child who is ready to be adopted is the evidence of a never born or painfully aborted parental ability, but this child is also the author of the birth of a family. Indeed, with its arrival the parental couple becomes a family. But at the same time that child came from a family with a specific identity, where it was assigned a relational place, a place that it will need to re-negotiate in the new family. And by relational place I do not mean a generational place but rather a fantasmatic function and role in a generational chain or a place “outside” the family, like the children who imitate adults as soon as they can, or a “non-place”, as often happens in the most serious situations, which does not mean that the child did not have a place in the family, but that it occupied a denied place and that inside it there was a place that would not be conceded.

In order to affiliate to the new family and to locate itself in the generational chain, an adopted child must re-elaborate and share its history and that of the new family in addition to joining in the family myth.

On the question of “sharing the history”, I am reminded of an operation carried out by my late adolescent children, who, when, starting from a trivial event, started asking questions about our family history. “I remember when mother took me to the countryside… Do you remember when we went for walks… Do you remember when auntie came to visit… Tell me how you managed to breast feed me and make me sleep…” I don’t know who took the initiative, if I started telling stories or if they asked questions. Today they are old enough to be able to reverse roles.

It is not the story that we build that is important, nor the various possible stories that emerge and are shaped in various moments of life. What is crucial, however, is a sort of historicization process that is activated between children and parents, and also in analysis, i.e. the function that unfolds over time and allows us to mark and qualify events, creating a before, a now and an after, an inside and an outside, locating ourselves in a continuum.

This historicization process allows us to select and take over the family’s “mythical store-room” on which transference can draw, what Aulagnier called the memory allowance by means of which the canvas of any biography is woven.

This process is thus related to the ability to historicize, i.e. to create one’s history and reflect upon it and its events.

Another point is clearly illustrated by Ariela’s and Beatrice’s cases: the question of the relationship between an adopted child and the adopting family’s myth. In our case history we can see the coincidence of some features of the adopting family’s original myth and the fantasy-family novel of the adopted girl. The family myth ended up by being similar to and influencing the myth of her origin developed by the girl.

This coincidence also had worrying aspects as it prevented the girl from being disillusioned, the little mermaid from putting her feet on the ground, action that Ariela clearly needed. This coincidence ran the risk of being explosive, but it is also true that  mythopoietic activity is a precursor of elaboration, an initial effort at elaborating issues, experiences and traumas that the family on one side and the girl on the other had not been able to understand and repress in order to start making contact with historical events whose introjection was impossible because the change was so big and took place too quickly.

I will not dwell on the issue of myth, as I have talked and written about it elsewhere, but I think that as psychoanalysts we must also  consider the family myth as a source of identification, especially when the situation entails a discussion of identity.

The myth, seen as an unconscious trans-generational group fantasy, belongs to the family’s symbolic universe, mostly concerns the family’s history and is reshaped in time, but leaves its core intact and at times secret for generations.

All family members, from one generation to the other, participate in creating it and keeping it alive, thus organizing the continuity of a family culture and perpetuating a traumatogenetic functioning in pathological situations.

The family myth has three main functions as described by Evelyn Granjon: 1) a function of close-knitting the group because the myth shapes family ties and thus contributing to defining expectations and prohibitions, and I would like to add that it also describes roles and attributions of the various family members; 2) a function of signifying-interpreting, as a source of identification; 3) a function of conveying the group’s unconscious as it enrols the family into a filiation and a history.

The question of the family myth must therefore be treated with great care in cases where the affiliation and belonging are complicated. Indeed, myth is like a language where “ significant material (a tale) has the function of conveying a meaning” (LeviStrauss, 1962). While the myth seems to describe reality, it teaches and prescribes how reality should be read.

In non-pathological situations the prescribing function can be questioned by the subject’s history, who in turn can re-signify some aspects of the myth later on in life.

These two implications of myths may always be present in the individual and family world and create fears that are activated in specific moments of life, such as adoption or birth of a child. In this sense the code of the myth becomes both a tool for knowing and an ethical code.

The evaluation of parenting

I would like to close with some general considerations on the question of parenting.

One of the most difficult tasks for those called to act in these situations is the evaluation of the parenting ability of the couple who request adoption. To summarize briefly some reflections on this, I do not believe that parenting is made up only of love; not even the narcissistic love described by Freud as representing a part of the self is enough to vouchsafe good parenting. Other aspects seem to be more important, such as the ability to contain and possibly work through the suffering related to the child’s growth in the family; the ability to tolerate the destructive drives described by Klein; the ability to repair the narcissistic wound produced by the birth of a child, in addition to the capacity for attuning with the child’s mental states, without denying and disowning them, without projecting our phantasms, needs or wishes on the children, an ability recently illustrated by Fonagy^[3] and also discussed by Vivienne Green who used the term “reflective ability”. The parenting ability is a function of the mind, but also a function of the couple relation. As a function of the mind it refers to our identification with our parents, as we have known them as parents. As a function of the couple relationship it refers to the integration of mother and father as a fantastic unit. This does not mean, as is often trivially said, that the parents must always get along well. I have seen more serious pathologies in couples who forced themselves to agree or pretended to get along than I have seen in healthily divorced couples. Integration in parenting means to be able to perform the maternal and paternal function in the couple with mutual integration. In performing her maternal role a mother does not only express aspects of herself but also fantasies of her maternal role that are projected from her partner and vice-versa.

At times this means that there are mothers who perform their function by also substituting the father and vice-versa. And such functions do not need to be attached to a role, but can be found in the family as a whole without being performed by one of the specific individuals.

So, we can say that there are normal families who are patriarchal or matriarchal, enlarged, nuclear, reconstituted or single-parent.

We must, therefore, not only focus on individuals and their internal world, but also on the ties between people, their quality, the mental states that characterize the individual and the family and the family’s identity at the inter- and trans-generational level. I am talking of family identity as different from the identity of each member, even if the former also contributes to the establishment and organization of the latter.

I think that these are the reference points of an evaluation of parenting, always keeping in mind that no-one is born a parent, but that we become parents, (Winnicott talked of learning the job of parenting) in a slow transformational process that involves various levels and is modulated and articulated over time.

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References

AA.VV. (1999), Le divan familial, n. 2, primavera.

Bolognini S. (1999), Come vento, come onda, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.

Del Guerra R., Lucarelli D., Strusberg S. (2001), Emigrazione, crisi di identità e ambiguità, in De Rosa E. (a cura di), Bambini immigrati, Martano, Lecce.

Freud S. (1919), Il perturbante, in OSF, 9, 81-118.

Freud S. (1925), La negazione, in OSF, 10.

Freud S. (1926), Discorso all’associazione ebraica, in OSF, 10. Granjon E. (2000), “Mythopoïèse et souffrance familiale”, Le Divan Familial, n. 4, primavera 2000, pp. 13-23.

Grinberg L. e R. (1976), Identità e cambiamento, Armando, Roma.

Kaës R. (2002), “La costruzione dell’identità in correlazione all’alterità e alla differenza”, Psiche, anno X, n. 1, pp. 185-195.

Levi Strauss C. (1962), La pensée sauvage, Plon, Paris.

Morral Colajanni C. (1996), “Dalla saga delle sirene al recupero della sensorialità”, Richard e Piggle, n. 2/96, pp. 183-200. Nicolò A.M., Zampino A.F. (2002), Lavorare con la famiglia, Carocci, Roma.

Rivista Interazioni, “Famiglie ricostituite e nuove filiazioni”, n. 12002, Franco Angeli, Milano.

Winnicott D.W. (1974), Sviluppo affettivo e ambiente, Armando, Roma.

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[1] Translation and revision of the article « Identità e identificazione nelle adozioni » published in « Interazioni – Clinica e ricerca psicoanalitica nell’individuo, coppia, famiglia » 2/2002, Milano, Franco Angeli Editore.

[2] MD., psychyatrist, training analyst SPI – IPA, director of International Review of Psychoanalysis of Couple and Family.

[3] For Fonagy it is also the ability of attuning to the child’s mental states and having a theory on how its mind works.