One of the highlights of Betty Jean Lifton’s book, Twice Born, is the conversations she relates with her husband, the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. His is a calm voice of reason as hers is sometimes not. I particularly like the following quote because it puts being an adoptee in perspective.
“Everyone survives some kind of trauma in early life….In that sense
every one is a survivor. But an adoptee does have a particular kind of separation,” he conceded. “It can be debilitating or it can give special insight.”
What I object to in some of Betty Jean Lifton’s writing is that I hear the whine of self-sorrow. That particularly annoys me because she was adopted at the age 2 ½ without any background of serious neglect or abuse. And yet she describes her own adoption, as do others in the search and open sealed records movement, as a Holocaust. I find that an exaggeration and the use of an historic and tragic event as an inappropriate metaphor. She was not, as my two-year-old younger sister Janey, an abused or seriously neglected child. She did not, as Janey did, spend 26 months in an impoverished and understaffed county orphanage that could barely provide for the children’s physical needs and had no time to address their emotional needs. What would she call Janey’s history? An Armageddon?
On another topic, Betty Jean Lifton asks her husband,
“Why do some adoptees have to search for their natural (her own special word for biological) parents while others do not?”
Robert J. Lifton answers that some of an adoptee’s need to search has to do with relationships with the adoptee’s parents. I am sure that is true. I think my recovery from a background of abuse and abandonment is largely due to my intelligent, sensitive and loving adoptive mother. It’s hardly a secret that Betty Jean did not enjoy a good relationship with her adoptive mother nor was her relationship with her biological mother, once she managed to find her, any better. In her own words, “I had two mothers instead of one, but since both had disappointed me, I had none.”
But she does not simply ask her husband about those who have little or no interest in connecting to their biological origins. She slurs them, describing them as “eternal children,” “artificial,” even “Uncle Toms.” She brands them with such psychobabble terms as “self-denigrating” and sees them as full of “internalized guilt.”
On yet another subject her husband, Robert Jay Lifton, says:
“I would say that if one is twice born (adopted), one has to carve out a new self distinct from the one society has assigned you.”
Carving out a new self is precisely what I did. Sooner or later in life we learn that we all create our own identities, an insight that comes from Erik Erikson, the “father” of American identity studies. I do not believe knowledge of our biological origins is necessary to that process. In fact, it can be harmful. In my case, while my adoptive parents were influential in my creation of my own identity, I see myself as something other than they were and certainly very different from my biological family. Betty Jean Lifton finally comes to the same conclusion when she tells her husband,
“It (adoption) allowed me to create myself.”
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