Adoption and the mythopoietic function A critical event that can promote creativity

摘要

When adopting children, the ability of couples and families to redesign bonds becomes more important than before. The process of affiliation and filiation is connected with the possibility of coping with the unknown, which comes to the surface due to the unavoidable strangeness of an adoptive child in afamily. Family life thus experiences an evolutionary thrust, if it is possible to integrate the newcomer. This requires, however, psychological work until each individual has successfully completed his project, on the one hand to be alink of achain and on the other to be an autonomous subject. This process goes beyond the function of mythcreation of the family, the mythopoetic. By creating anew myth, the adoptive child can develop asense of belonging to the family (affiliation). Thus, adoption can provide the opportunity to write anew family history that, in its new patterns and new myths, takes up the unknown and unknowable of the child and makes it part of the new family.