Demonstrating how psychoanalytic understanding and treatment can contribute to thinking about and working with adopted children and their families, this book illustrates how psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help both as a treatment and as a distinctive source of understanding for children who are either in the process of being adopted or already adopted. The book explores the nature and experiences of children placed for adoption, and how these shape and are shaped by unconscious processes in the child’s inner world. --- from the publisher Contents: 1. Creating a Placement for Children: Opening Minds and Shutting Doors? 2. Talking about Relationships and Thinking about Development: A Psychoanalytic Perspective 3. Psychoanalytic Thinking about the Adoption Process 4. The Mermaid: Moving Towards Reality after Trauma 5. On Being Dropped and Picked Up: Adopted Children and their Internal Objects 6. The Emotional Tasks of Moving from Fostering to Adoption: Transitions, Attachment, Separation and Loss 7. Just Pretend 8. Becoming a ‘Creative Couple’ 9. Becoming a Baby: Discovering Dependency in the Context of a Family 10. Loss and Recovery and Adoption: A Child’s Perspective 11. Some Oedipal Problems in Work with Adopted Children and their Parents 12. The Lionocerous: An Adopted Boy’s Struggle to Find Himself 13. A Five Year Old’s Dilemmas and Struggles with Belonging 14. The Forever Family and the ghosts of the dispossessed15. Conclusion | 
