Meeting Elsewhere. The Group in Adoption
Abstract
In this article, after brief considerations of the characteristics of the “towards and beyond adoption” formative path and after a personal testimony that wishes to give voice to the children met in several institutions in the Ukraine, the consequences of the trauma of abandonment are commented on. There follows a taking under examination group modality that can be productively utilized in the sphere of the process of adoption, in all its phases with various actors on the adoption path.
In particular, we examine more closely the group applied to post adoption, in its value as facilitative setting of “elsewhere”. This “elsewhere” is a place far away in which the child’s suffering parts come together, hidden in the depths of the unconscious, an apparently safe psychic place, but where confusion and fragmentation rule, where there are neither words nor depictions, where there are neither boundaries nor tenderness, where the securely bound being is transformed into the overwhelmed being. In this place, in this “elsewhere”, that we “sufficiently good” adults are called to be there, to find exactly that place where the child has lived a sufferance too great in respect to what has remained alone for too long. It is that place that the adult, by way of experience of the group, can exercise his function of receptiveness and empathetic closeness, to relive with the child a relational experience in a way that is finally positive, capable of restoring continuity to the brokenness of his existence.
