"Samara" <pangs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:c0c31648-2571-4837-9789-aec7c8dd739a@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Feb 24, 7:09 pm, "deja.blues" <deja.bl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> "Michelle la Belle" <aminotem...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
>>
messagenews:815cdf3a-657f-47a1-a96b-854ee49c11d0@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> "Working with Joe for the past few weeks has been very helpful to me.
>> If you're not interested in my sup****t group, feel free to ignore my
>> posts."
>>
>> So you're the OP?
>
> Sorry I don't know what "OP" means.
>
> There is overwhelming evidence to sup****t my belief that adoption is
> detrimental to the emotional health of both adoptees and birth
> mothers..............
>
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~adoption/studies/SchechterOAC.htm
>
>
> Marshall D. Schechter, "Observations on Adopted Children," 1960
> Marshall Schechter, a psychiatrist in private practice in Beverly
> Hills, California, re****ted in 1960 that adoptees were 100 times more
> likely than non-adoptees to present a range of serious emotional
> problems. Like a number of other contributions to the psychopathology
> literature, Schechter's re****t was based on a tiny number of cases. He
> presented information about 120 children seen in his practice between
> 1948 and 1953, of whom exactly sixteen (or 13.3 percent) were adopted.
> Since adoptees numbered less than one-tenth of one percent in the
> general population, adopted children were greatly over-represented in
> his practice. Schechter's friend, Povl Toussieng, a child psychiatrist
> at the famous Menninger Clinic, had also told him that up to one-third
> of all children seen as outpatients at the clinic were adopted.
> Schechter's own observations, confirmed by a trusted colleague, were
> the basis for his conclusion. Adoption had an emotionally damaging
> impact on child development.
>
> What exactly was it about adoption that caused problems? According to
> Schechter, the answer could be found in the psychoanalytic theory that
> "object relations" (the first and closest ties formed between infants
> and the adults who care for them) were crucial determinants of
> personhood. Children could not cope with the knowledge that they had
> been rejected by birth parents and no amount of reassurance that their
> adoptive parents loved and wanted them could make up for the "severe
> narcissistic injury" that adoption inflicted. Each and every one of
> his sixteen cases illustrated "how the idea of adoption had woven
> itself into the framework of the child's personality configuration."
> Telling children they were adopted was mandatory, Schechter agreed,
> but it also precipitated psychological difficulties. Carefully timing
> and managing the details of telling could help mitigate the resulting
> problems. (Later studies challenged this view. See, for example, the
> excerpt from Benson Jaffee and David Fanshel, How They Fared in
> Adoption.)
>
> Schechter was not the first person to suggest that adoption posed
> intrinsic psychological risks. As early as 1937, psychiatrist David
> Levy presented case histories showing that adoptees suffered from
> "primary affect hunger," a term he used to describe what is now called
> attachment disorder. A number of other clinicians in the U.S. and
> Britain published re****ts in the 1940s and 1950s about the deleterious
> consequences of growing up "without genealogy." It was the boldness of
> Schechter's claim that adopted children were much more likely to
> become neurotic and psychotic that galvanized helping professionals
> and therapeutic approaches to adoption. It also generated a great deal
> of controversy. H. David Kirk, author of Shared Fate, called
> Schechter's study "spurious." Many other researchers were equally
> skeptical that adoption was the sort of risk factor Schechter
> maintained it was.
>
> Schechter's methodology drew the most fire. Small numbers of detailed
> case histories had long been standard features of medical research and
> psychiatrists renowned for their contributions to developmental
> theory, including Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, relied on them
> extensively. But psychologists and social workers with training in
> scientific research methods insisted that Schechter's sample was far
> too small to be representative and disparaged his crude and inaccurate
> statistical calculations. His research design was so flawed as to be
> hopelessly unreliable.
>
> Schechter responded by sending a questionnaire to members of the
> Southern California Psychiatric Society and various regional
> institutions. A follow-up re****t presented empirical data showing that
> adoptees showed up in clinical populations everywhere at much higher
> than average rates.
>
> Schechter's account of the damage that adoption did to children was
> vigorously contested during the 1960s. Today, it is widely accepted by
> parents and professionals who agree that attachment and loss are at
> the heart of what makes adoption a distinctive and difficult
> experience. This consensus was efficiently summarized in a book that
> Schechter co-edited with developmental psychologist David Brodzinsky:
> The Psychology of Adoption (1990).
>
>
Marshall Schecter is hardly Joe Soll. Please learn to discern.
Marley
|
