Here's an article I found ~ written by Florence Clothier, M.D., in 1943. This is an excerpt from "The Psychology of the Adopted Child", The National Committee for Mental Health, Journal on Mental Hygiene., New York.
Did you pay attention to the year? 1943!!
Susie
Trauma to Child
Every adopted
child, at some time 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 developments 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 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.
It is pertinent
never to lose sight of the fact that no matter how lost to him his natural
parents may be, the adopted child carries stamped in every cell of his body
genes derived from his forebears. The primitive stuff of which he is made and
which he will pass on to future generations was determined finally at the time
of his conception. . . The implications of this for the psychology of the
adopted child are of the utmost significance.
The child who is
placed with adoptive parents at or soon after birth misses the mutual and
deeply satisfying mother-child relationship, the roots of which lie in that
deep area of the personality where the physiological and psychological are
merged. Both for the child and for the natural mother, that period is part of a
biological sequence, and it is to be doubted whether the relationship to it’s
post-partum mother, in it’s subtler effects, can be replaced by even the best
of substitute mothers.
But those subtle
effects lie so deeply buried in the personality that, in light of our present
knowledge, we cannot evaluate them. We do know more about the trauma that an
older baby suffers when he is separated from his mother, with whom his
relationship is no longer merely parasitic, but toward whom he has developed
active social strivings. For some children, and in some stages of development,
this severing of the budding social relationship can cause irreparable harm.
The child’s willingness to sacrifice instinctive gratifications and infantile
pleasures for the sake of love relationships has proved a bitter
disillusionment, and he may be loath to give himself into a love relationship
again.’
