Adoptive parenting and group space
Abstract
Through an analysis of the experience of working with groups of adoptive parents, this paper highlights that the real reason behind their more general request for help is actually the need to work through their decision to adopt, their difficulty in accepting a family identity without biological roots, and the uncertainty concerning their child’s affective attachment, which is potentially threatened by the phantasms of his biological parents.
The use of a “group” allowed the parents to fuse a “gnostic” with a “practical” approach, that of rational knowledge with emotive feeling, in order to rediscover a wholeness of the self through good affective relations, leading in turn to the creation of a common history between them and their children.
