Opening Comments

Child placement policies and practices are always based on ideas as to what kind of society we want to be. We want to keep a balance between the needs of the child and those of the parents—divorced, biological, foster, or adoptive. We seek new legal frameworks to allow for different kinds of placements with varying degrees of access, openness, and privacy. The goal is to find relationship arrangements that will do justice to all the individuals involved. The job of shaping and testing new arrangements, determining their limits, may take decades. We will learn who are the parents actually ready to raise a child in joint custody or to foster or adopt a child while maintaining access to the biological parents. We will learn what forms of access are likely to enhance or jeopardize the relationships and growth of the participants. We will discover patterns that encourage or discourage parents in undertaking new forms of placement and ways for professionals to relate to these families. We may find that the issue of the “compulsive” identity search is less critical than the difficulties involved in establishing intrafamilial boundaries and developing optimal conditions for raising children. The art of anticipating agency-induced “latrogenic errors” will become indispensable. It will be used for developing fair ground rules for those involved in the experience of child placement. This will improve an imperfect world by restoring two concepts—that the rights of the individual can be protected without neglecting the needs of others and that contractual arrangements and interpersonal commitments cannot only be revised but also honored. These concepts have rapidly weakened since Freud. On the basis of his theories the psychology of the family and the community shifted dramatically to that of the individual's internal plight. The culmination of that powerful trend was seen among mental health professionals who focused exclusively on the phenomenology of the foster child's or adoptee's identity search, fantasies, and anxieties, and only incidentally on the concerns of the adoptive, foster, and biological parents. The professionals were aware of the dynamic patterns of coalitions and splits set up between an agency's representative and the sets of parents involved, but for them these interactions were merely the background in a drama of intrapsychic forces struggling for resolution. The tendency has been to look inside people's heads and to consider the agency's involvement and the organizing power of the interpersonal arrangement as secondary influences in the making of problems. This tendency—by no means only a lamentable and myopic error of the past—may be yielding. Whether disguised as interactional theory, as family-oriented perceptions, or as awareness of context, consideration for the needs of others is coming back. More adoptees and foster children are concerned that their successful search may prove to be less than welcome to unconsenting biological parents. More professionals are concerned with preventing a particular outlook, whether it be the doctrinaire position of the courts or agencies thirty years ago or the self-actualizing drive of the adoptee or foster child today, from asserting itself at the expense of others. Practitioners look for a new ethic and for informed viewpoints to make wiser decisions when dealing with child placement. The following section offers three such viewpoints. The first paper favors the continuity of biological or previous family ties across a variety of child placement settings and views the identity search as more than an inner event, as a nonpathological social quest and an integrative experience. The second paper attributes the “compulsive” identity search to “psychological stress within the adoptive family” and “distortion in the vitally important area of adoptive education”; it stresses the importance of safeguarding the contractual foundations of adoption. The third paper emphasizes the need to develop empirical data on the impact on birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees of the movement to unseal adoption records; it describes a study of the attitudes of birth parents who relinquished children in the past. The strengths of each presentation are limited by the problems imposed by self-selected samples, but the papers afford the reader the opportunity of looking at the child-placement experience from different perspectives.