Psychology of a Adopted Child

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Chapter 1 Introduction Introduction:- The child who does not grow up with his own biological parents, who does not even know them or anyone of his own blood, is an individual who has lost the thread of family continuity. A deep identification with our forebears, as experienced originally in the mother-child relationship, gives us our most fundamental security. The child’s repeated discoveries that the mother from whom he has been biologically separated will continue to warm him, nourish him, and protect him pours into the very structure of his personality a stability and a reassurance that he is safe, even in this new, alien world. Every adopted child, at some point in his development, has been deprived of this primitive relationship with his mother. This trauma and the severing of the individual from his racial antecedents lie at the core of what is peculiar to the psychology of the adopted child. The adopted child presents all the complications in social and emotional development seen in the own child. But the ego of the adopted child, in addition to all the normal demands made upon it, is called upon to compensate for the wound left by the loss of the biological mother. Later on this appears as an unknown void, separating the adopted child from his fellows whose blood ties bind them to the past as well as to the future. Environment, or experience, influences the personality in very different ways, depending upon the age and maturity the individual. Those experiences and emotional relationships which exist in earliest childhood have effects that are incorporated into the very structure of the personality. Experiences and relationships after the oedipal development may mold or modify the presenting or external personality but their effects are as a general rule not incorporated or built into the personality. It may be said the external environment functions
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