Antisocial behavior in adoptees: Patterns and dynamics

A recurrent pattern of provocative, antisocial, delinquent behaviors has been found by the senior author and others to be characteristic of clinically referred adopted children and adolescents. Although the parents often defensively insist that adoption is not relevant to the child's problems, the child himself frequently reveals obsessive fantasies about his birth parents. The underlying psychodynamics include the child's inability to integrate two sets of parental images—often one bad and the other good—into a single realistic image, and resultant impairment in the development of the superego. A negative self-image is often mirrored by the adoptive parents' projection of their own unacceptable impulses onto the child and the birth parents. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for post-adoption counseling, clinical treatment, open records, and screening of potential adoptive parents.