I had lunch with a local social worker last week. A month ago I talked with an outstanding young woman who directs the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) program in our county that does so much to protect children in foster care. While we covered many subjects, I asked both of them; do you recognize the name Betty Jean Lifton? They did not. Betty Jean died last November and I suppose those whose books were written a generation ago cannot be expected to be remembered forever. But I can’t think of anyone more responsible for the creation of what we are now calling open adoption.
When I retired from my career as an American diplomat over a decade ago, I had for the first time the leisure to explore and reflect on a subject that has long been important to my self-understanding. My adoption. I read a small library of books at that time. I read Brodzinsky and Kirk, Tresiolitis and Sorosky, Kemertz and Toth, and Weger and Verrier and others whose names you may or may not recognize. But above all, I read Betty Jean Lifton. I found her an intelligent and gifted writer. She raised many issues in a provocative way in her books ---Twice Born (1975), Lost and Found, the Adoption Experience (1979), and The Journey of the Adopted Self (1994. Her books challenged me to think deeply about my own experience and to write down my reaction to her theories and conclusions, which were quite different from my own.
They may have been different because she did not have my history of biological family abuse and neglect. Nor had she spent two years in a county orphanage as I did. While my adoption was also “sealed and secret,” I did not have to wonder about what family and culture I had come from. I had memories and I was glad to be freed of that family and that culture.
Lifton wrote as if she was speaking for all adoptees, a noun she sometimes capitalized. Her books are sprinkled with such inclusive phrases as “As adoptees,” “Nearly all adoptees,” “We adoptees.” She seemed to think the adoption experience extended only as far as her own experience and that of other adoptees she interviewed or counseled. But she did not speak for me and I can suspect she did not speak for the majority of adoptees.
I don’t think anyone can speak for all adoptees. I think each one of us experience the wonderful institution of adoption differently. The three siblings with whom I was adopted (four of us into one family on the same day) had a different experience from mine. I was five years old when we were abandoned to a county orphanage and eight years old when we were adopted. I had many memories and attachments to two members of my biological family. My younger siblings were two and three years old when we were placed in the orphanage and had no memories of that family at all. In sum, I think Betty Jean Lifton did not pay enough attention to the diversity of what it means to be adopted.
I also think Betty Jean Lifton was too hard on adoptive parents, romanticized biological relationships and blamed most of the psychological problems of adoptees on “the closed and secret system” of sealed records while paying little or no attention to other causes such as the stigma once attached to adoption, which though weaker today continues to exist. The other and most important source of problems for adoptees is a poor adoptive experience. I think unhappiness in her own adoption led her at times to be critical of adoption altogether. I find in her writing little of the positive, of the joy, of the fulfillment that most adopters and adoptees (85% to 90% in most studies) take from the experience. Too often she writes as if adoption was only a sorrowful business full of perils that creates mostly unhappy human beings. She did not believe that adoptive families can be “as strong and as enduring” as biological families. I think they can. In future blogs I will present another, more positive view of the amazing institution of adoption.
But before I begin to disagree with her on some fundamental issues, I want to honor Betty Jean Lifton. She had great influence on the practice of adoption today, especially open adoption. She probed the depths of her own experience honestly and was right sometimes as well as wrong sometimes. In her books she included the voices of those such as psychoanalyst Erik Erikson who disagreed with her. Please keep that in mind in the blogs that follow when I disagree with her in this new series I will call, “A Dialogue with Betty Jean Lifton.”
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