Adoption as a Lifelong Process - A Psychiatric Analysis

This book addresses the psychosocial complexities of adoption from multiple perspectives, including the biological family, adopted child, and adoptive parents. It highlights the must-have sensitivity and tactfulness for recurring discussions of the adoption situation.
Organized into 10 parts, the book begins with a brief outline of the history of adoption and its legal status from antiquity to modern times. Chapters in the first half of the book examine critical topics such as different parenthood situations, stress and pain processes in early childhood, and challenges of domestic, international, transcultural, transracial, foster, and sexual and gender minorities adoption. Within the second half of the book, chapters describe the birth parents' difficulties in relinquishing their infant, the motives of the adoptive parents, and the hardships of the adoptive children in self-development. The final chapters address the topic of deprivation, traumatization, and developmental trauma disorders on a psychodynamic level accompanied by clinical vignettes.

Unique, perceptive, and insightful, Adoption, A Life Long Process is an essential resource for all of those involved in the adoption process, including counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, adoptive parents, and biological parents.

Barbara Steck, MD 

Lecturer emeritus in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

University of Basel, Switzerland

Barbara Steck, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist for children and adolescents. She trained in psychoanalysis and family therapy and worked in private practice in Lausanne, Switzerland from 1983 to 1993. At the same time, she was a consultant for adoption in the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic of the University of Lausanne.  From 1994 to 2003 she worked as a senior physician in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry of the University of Basel, where she was an academic lecturer and active in teaching and research. She was the principal investigator for Switzerland of an international multisite research project, which was supported by a grant from the European Union in its 5th framework program 'Quality of Life': Children of somatically ill parents (COSIP). Since 2004 she works as a psychoanalytic therapist and supervisor in private practice. She is an author of more than 50 publications and book chapters, covering many fields of child and adolescent psychiatry such as issues in adoption, effects of trauma, somatic or psychic illnesses of parents as well as therapeutical aspects (indication for psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, psychodrama group therapy, palliative medicine). She is the author of many books.