Fostered Kinship and Parenthood
Becoming a parent when one has been adopted is not merely a life transition; it is a psychic journey, a profound inner movement in which the foundations of bonding, origin, and transmission are revisited. Adoption is never confined to childhood. It resurfaces throughout adulthood, especially during transformative moments. The prospect of parenthood reactivates traces of abandonment, fantasies about origins, and questions about one’s ability to transmit love, history, and identity.
Psychoanalytic theory conceptualizes filiation across several dimensions such as biological, symbolic, psychic, and narrative, all of which adoption uniquely challenges. Biologically, uncertainty about one’s origins may provoke deep anxiety. As one expectant mother shared: “I don’t even know where I come from, so how will my baby know where they come from?” Symbolically, the legal and social framework provides legitimacy, yet does not guarantee psychological integration. A patient reflected: “Yes, I was adopted. I had a loving family… but I always felt something was missing.”
The psychic dimension concerns the intimate appropriation of the parental bond. An adopted woman confided: “I’m afraid I’ll be like the one who left me. It feels like there’s a flaw in me.” The narrative axis allows individuals to construct continuity, to rewrite their personal history through transmission. Parenthood becomes a space where these layers are reactivated, sometimes in conflict. As one man undergoing assisted reproduction said: “I need a child to prove that I belong to a lineage too.”
Bydlowski’s notion of psychic transparency describes this vulnerable period in which unconscious material emerges with particular intensity. The process of becoming psychically parental may be delayed, obstructed, or, for some, creatively transformed. One adoptive mother explained: “I created my own rituals with my daughter. They don’t resemble anything I received, but they’re ours.” Others experience ambivalence, inhibition, or a sense of illegitimacy.
Clinically, the therapist’s role is to support symbolisation and narrative elaboration, to validate parenthood without demanding justification. Adoptive parenthood shows that parental bonds are not decreed — they are built, negotiated, imagined, and narrated. Adopted individuals may become the architects of meaningful, deeply human kinship, crafting a lineage that emerges not in spite of their history, but through it.
REFERENCES
Bydlowski, M. (2005). La transparence psychique de la grossesse. Paris, France : PUF.
Golse, B. (2010). L’attachement : concepts et applications. Paris, France : Odile Jacob.
Lebovici, S. (1998). Les interactions précoces mère-enfant. Paris, France : Masson.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London, UK: Hogarth Press.
