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Darling Adopted Daughter: A memoir investigating adoption wounds
Dissertation   Open access

Darling Adopted Daughter: A memoir investigating adoption wounds

Jo-Ann Sparrow
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Doctor of Creative Arts, University of the Sunshine Coast
2014
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25907/00245
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Abstract

memoir adoption magical realism trauma catharsis second voice
In The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, Nancy Verrier (1993) argues that when the natural evolution and bond of mother and baby is interrupted by a postnatal separation from the biological mother, the resultant experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of children, causing a ‗primal wound'. Verrier describes the wound as ‗physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual...and causing pain so profound as to have been described as cellular' (xvi). Dr Betty Jean Lifton (1994, p. 51) further argues in Journey Of The Adopted Self: A Quest For Wholeness, that when a baby is separated from its mother at birth or soon after and adopted, when the ‗self' is still entwined with that of the mother, they experience a psyche ‗split' and become a Divided Self. She claims adopted children split into the Forbidden Self and the Artificial Self, neither of which is completely true or completely false.

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