Trauma and the developmental process. Excerpts from an analysis of an adopted child

The adopted child faces a complex developmental task. Having a vital need for a parent, he has to deal with the traumatic loss of one set of parents and at the same time has to allow new, alien adults to become his parents. Some implications of this life situation on the developing representations of self and other and on self-other relations are explored in the three-year course of psychoanalysis of a five-and-a-half-year-old boy.