From Turning Away to Turning Toward: Adoption as Radical Hospitality

Abstract

This paper, combining theoretical ideas with passages of personal memoir, focuses on the journey that both adopted children and adoptive parents experience: going from the inner state of turning away to the inner state of turning toward, and from the experience of “nowhere-ness” to the experience of “being at home.” Using the terms “hypotonia” and “hypertonia” in their psychic context, the paper describes a unique form of attachment that characterizes children who have undergone severe primary trauma. Instead of a constant movement between a state of connection and a state of separation, in this case there is a negation of both. Since hypotonia is not a state of separation but of non-connection, whereas hypertonia is not a state of connection but a state of adhesion, both hypertonia and hypotonia imply an attack on bonding and linking. The paper suggests understanding adoption as radical form of hospitality, one that challenges the borders of the host’s mind and body, but also allows, through this very challenging, letting both the strange and the stranger in.

Keywords:

• adoption
• early trauma
• homelessness
• hospitality
• psychic tone

My deep connection with the subject of adoption is related to my being the mother of a son born in St Petersburg, Russia, whom I adopted when he was nearly one year old. Combining theoretical ideas and clinical material with passages of personal memoir, this paper might be considered an attempt to manage the big cracks that can present themselves upon the adoption of a child, and to face them by employing both “metonymical witnessing”—i.e., located in the first person and in the experiencing I—and “metaphorical witnessing,” which creates a constant movement between the first person and the third person, or between the experiencing I and the reflective I (Amir, 2016, 2019). There is no other way I could write it.

In her book The Adoption Life Cycle (1992), Elinor Rosenberg writes that one of the great illusions concerning adoption is that it offers the fantasy of the perfect solution, both for the biological parents, who feel unable to raise the child they just had, and the adoptive parents who want to raise a child but cannot have one, as well as for the child himself, who is in desperate need of a home. This ostensibly perfect solution, however, is what none of the parties ever wanted (Rosenberg, 1992). Presumably, she argues, biological parents would have preferred to be able to bring up their own child; many adoptive parents would rather have raised their own biological children; and adopted children would have preferred for the parents who raise them to be the same parents who gave birth to them.

Elsewhere, Rosenberg writes that even when the process has evolved in the best possible way—and both the parents and the child are happy—there will always be present, between them, the knowledge that somewhere out there the biological parents are mourning the child they could not raise themselves, a knowledge that haunts the alleged sense of perfection (Rosenberg, 1992). In adoption, therefore, unlike in the case of raising a birthed child, deep processes of mourning are always included: those of the parents, those of the child, and those of the unspoken parental ghosts, whose presence is felt long before the bonding that must contain such processes of mourning has even had a chance to develop.

Various authors have called the inner representation of the birth parent in the context of adopted children a “hole object” (Quinodoz, 1996, p. 324), a “lost object (Deeg, 1989, p. 152), or a “phantom object” (Rosenberg & Horner, 1991, p. 73). What is the difference between mourning a real object and mourning a phantom object? Sopher (2018) suggests the notion of a mental “phantom pain” associated with the removal of a mental organ. To allow the self to survive a premature experience of separation, a part of the mind undergoes “amputation” and becomes disconnected from the other parts of the psyche, so that contact with this part is lost. The only remaining sign of its existence is in the form of “phantom pains:” pains whose source is unknown or unthinkable and which are not amenable to treatment (Sopher, 2018).

In the arena of adoption, a phantom parental object is not just the result of amputation from the psychic body; by virtue of being unknown, it is an object that never attained the status of a real, mournable object. The hole such an object causes in the fabric of the infantile mind lacks outline in many ways and is therefore immeasurable. Thus, even though the difference between babies who have been adopted immediately after birth and babies who spent months and sometimes years in institutions before being adopted is huge, they nevertheless share the experience of the phantom object of the biological parent.

Not only the adopted child’s work of mourning but also the adoptive parent’s work of mourning links back to a phantom object. Adoptive parents, too, find themselves coping with an infantile phantom object that lacks concrete boundaries: except for the case of ideological adoption, in which the family decided to adopt a child for social or moral reasons, every adopted child is, to an extent, a substitute for a biological child who wasn’t born, a phantom child who functions as an ideal prototype. And while all parenting can be associated with concessions in view of held prototypes of both ideal parent and ideal child, the concessions involved in adoption are far greater. The adopted child’s work of mourning thus parallels, at least up to a point, that of the adoptive parent: in both cases it concerns a phantasmatic object whose abstract nature causes it to grow infinitely, lacking concrete, realistic outlines. In both cases, mourning is not of a real object but rather about an idea of unconditional closeness, of natural, effortless love that does not need to strain to cover genetic and biographical gaps.

In addition, adoptive parents are forced to deal with the phantom object of the biological parents. Quite a few of the adoptive parents I have met over the years were preoccupied, no less than adopted children themselves, with the identities of their adoptive children’s biological parents. They shifted between arrogant contempt, blaming those parents not only for the difficulties their adopted children experienced, but also for their presumable genetic imperfections, on the one hand; and, on the other, suffering persecutory fantasies that if only the biological parents knew the extent of the adoptive parents’ failures with the children entrusted to their care, they would despise them.¹ The phantom object of the biological parent haunts the adoptive parent, or at least is present in the background in a way that is hard to ignore.

Finally, adoptive parents and adopted children both must deal with another phantom object: the phantom object of all the other potential adoptive parents who could have adopted this child. These transparent objects, too, are negotiated, consciously or not, in the theater of ghosts that is the adoptive home. In her paper, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” Fraiberg (1976) described the well-known phenomenon of unspoken presences affecting every mother-child pair, but where it concerns the adoptive child’s nursery, these presences are especially numerous.

Pivnick (2010) writes, justifiably, of the need for unique narratives of adoption, which, rather than looking at the phenomenon of adoption through one lens, recognize its diversity and richness. The present paper constitutes such a unique, personal narrative, on the one hand, and on the other hand—as unique narratives often do—it also touches a certain universal dimension relating to children dealing with early traumas of abandonment and loss.

When the Actual Object Turns Away

The orphanage in which my son spent the first year of his life wasn’t one of the worst. In documentaries about Romanian or Bulgarian orphanages one can see babies lying on their backs for days, never being approached by anyone, so radically immersed in their renunciation that they won’t even move their hand to chase away the flies that walk over their faces.

The institution in which my son stayed took relatively good care of the infants’ health and hygiene. Still, 30 babies were accommodated in one space, looked after by a rotating team of carers. To avoid outbreaks of disease, the babies were not allowed out, and so my son spent the first year of his life in one room, never exposed to daylight. The babies were fed while facing away from their carers so that neither side would form any attachment (it was assumed, mistakenly, that this was for their mutual benefit). This practice resulted in a mechanical disruption between the physical act of feeding and the sense of psychic nourishment that accompanies it under more typical circumstances. The babies seemed to have received the food they required, but the assembly-line method whereby a baby would be fed by one carer, washed by another, then moved onto a changing table where yet another, third carer would dress them, turned the sequence of physical actions that make up primary care—which serves as an early template for communication and attachment—into a meaningless, staccato, and emotionally flat chain of actions.

In addition, since they were instructed not to communicate with the babies, carers only talked with each other over the infants’ heads. The primary environment of the babies was therefore deeply inscribed with a sense of turning-away. This turning-away was not only related to the fact that the babies had been abandoned by their biological parents—i.e., they were babies whose first experience of their primary object was the latter’s turning away from them—but also to the fact that, along with the assembly-line care, they received no direct visual or vocal feedback from their carers. A baby who receives no direct visual or vocal feedback when being fed and cared for will only experience relationships as a kind of turning-away. I will return to this later.

When I first met the baby I was about to adopt, motherhood was not unknown territory: I was already the biological mother of a five-year-old son. I was allegedly prepared. But the baby whom the orphanage director put into my arms the moment I entered her office looked very different from the photographs that had been sent to me a month or two earlier. This was not simply because infants at this stage of life naturally change very fast. It also resulted from the inevitable gap between looking at a two-dimensional image and the encounter with a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional child, something which all at once exposed—over and beyond our mutual strangeness—the arbitrariness of the “match” between us.

The gap between my first encounter with my eldest son, the child that had grown inside me, and my first encounter with the new baby who was put into my arms from the outside, was huge. For the boys’ father, however, meeting the new baby was quite natural. In hindsight, I realized that the gap he had to straddle was not so significant as the one I faced: in a sense, our first son, too, had been handed to him from the outside, and thus, the difference in directionality was much less enormous for him than it was for me. For me it was the opposite: while my eldest son was born from inside out, my youngest son had to be born from the outside in.

I never thought adopting a child to be a one-off decision; it was rather a point in time within a long process of negotiations. I don’t mean negotiations with the adoption authorities, or with other members of the family who were as such connected to the adoption for the good and the bad. I mean negotiating with the actual possibility of relating to what appeared as pure chance—a child whom another woman had brought into the world, under conditions I would never know, wherein the sole reason for our coming together happened to be that the date of his birth coincided with the date of my application for adoption—as instead being inevitable, or fated.

My negotiations included all sorts of signs and portents: for instance, the fact that the name given to my youngest son when he was born was inexplicably identical to the name I’d given to my oldest son. Or the fact that the name of the city where he was born and on which my foot had never trod appeared, beyond comprehension, in a poem I’d written a year before I started to consider adopting a child. Such signs dissolved the scent of randomness that had enveloped the act of adoption. They signaled to me—or had I signaled to myself through them?—that what had seemed pure chance was in fact pre-ordained: this child was destined to be mine, even if in a circuitous manner whose hidden sense I would never be able to follow.

For one major source of anguish involved in adopting a child is connected precisely to this: What if I had submitted my application a month earlier, or a month later? What if the first photograph of an infant presented to me had been that of the infant adopted by our close friends, who over the years appeared in my eyes to resemble our older son far more than the infant we adopted? I’ve often wondered, for example, whether it wouldn’t have been better if a family of Sephardic origins had adopted my son. His skin tanned easily whenever exposed to the sun and turned a lovely shade of copper, completely different from the reddish skin tone of my oldest son when he remained outdoors for any stretch of time. Unlike me, he liked spicy food and often teased me over the Polish seasoning that went into the dishes I prepared. The TV sitcoms he loved most were always those that featured large and warm families, the sort in which one felt included on the strength of kinship itself.

During other difficult moments I thought to myself that if only he’d been adopted, for instance, by a woman whose character had been similar to my mother’s, who ran our childhood home—at least at first glance—highhandedly and strictly by the rule book, he’d have felt more secure than in the free and easy surroundings that we nurtured.

Be that as it may—and in sharp contrast to giving birth, wherein fate is in-built and sets the undertaking of parenthood in motion—chance is the name of the game when proceeding to adopt a child. Hence the great mission called upon the partners in such an undertaking is to turn chance into the foreordained, a bond that bears within it an ineluctable quality that isn’t inherently in-built.

The face in the first photo sent to us by the orphanage where he’d been taken in since his birth bore a worried look. He gazed sideways rather than directly at the camera, as though desperately seeking to fix his eyes on a familiar face. He was held in the arms of an elderly woman in a blue cloak who appeared to be one of the caretakers, but she was looking at the cameraman rather than at the infant as she exhibited him, her arms outstretched, as though holding an object whose worth she was asking the viewers to evaluate. A month later the first video recording arrived. He looked bigger than in the first photograph, roughly five months old, and was held in the arms of the same person in a blue cloak who we now knew wasn’t an attendant but rather the orphanage physician, with whom he had formed a special connection: He was the only child in the institution whom she called “my child.”

In this video she calls him by his name and tickles him to get him to smile at the camera. He avoids laughing, because one of the other infants in the room is crying and his gaze keeps straying toward him, as though he were begging someone to calm the other infant down so that he might finally give himself over to the attention being heaped on him. The video was sent to us with an apology for the fact that they hadn’t succeeded in getting him to smile, and with a promise to send another video in which he would look into the camera. From the point of view of the organization attending to the process of adoption, the video had been a marketing failure since it recorded a serious and anxious-looking infant.

For me, however, watching the video was the moment when chance gave way to a sense of fatedness. This fatedness wasn’t connected to his pretty face, nor to the fact, which also stood out, that he appeared to be more developed vis-à-vis the other infants, responding not only to physical contact but also to the words spoken to him (which is to say that he had developed, in spite of the privations under which he grew, the ability to understand and communicate by means of a language). It was connected to the attribute that the videoed scene had underlined, in effect, unknowingly, and that typified him far more than any other distinction ever since: his readiness to acknowledge someone else’s pain and hunger over his own.

Being-At-Home, Homelessness, Nowhere-Ness

Durban (2017) suggests that a sense of home in early infancy is achieved by way of an interaction between: (a) safe dwelling in the body-as-mother (constitution); (b) internalizing the mother-as-me (internal object space) and (c) establishing a triangular Oedipal space responsible for the capacity to move between narcissism-as-a-home and the world-as-a-home. The interplay between these elements in the construction of a sense of home is accompanied by distinct anxieties and unconscious phantasies. Durban argues that disruptions in this early process, due to constitutional deficit, disruptive internal object relations, or environmental factors, may lead to severe pathologies, mindlessness, hatred, and violence. He distinguishes between mental states of being-at-home, homelessness and nowhere-ness based on the corresponding levels of early development and typical anxieties. He considers being-at-home and homelessness as more developed states of object relating, allowing for some capacity for feelings of loss, mourning and longing. Nowhere-ness, however, stems from early states of anxiety-of-being, characterized by confusion between self and object, nameless grief, nameless dread, and devastation (Durban, 2017).

Adopted children seem to experience an intense disruption between the stage of dwelling in the body-as-mother (Durban, 2017)—often already disturbed by physical and mental pressures during pregnancy, and in any case severed from what happens after birth—and the stage of internalizing the mother-as-me (Durban, 2017). Not only does the latter occur without any continuity with the stage that precedes it, it often follows a stage of maternal vacuum (a stay at an orphanage, for instance). Maybe this is why children who were not adopted immediately after birth can move between states of homelessness (Durban, 2017)—which requires coping with loss and mourning—and states of nowhere-ness (Durban, 2017), implying vacant, blank mourning (Amir, 2020). Illustrating this internalized blankness, Beebe (2004) writes about what she calls facial mirroring, quoting an adopted patient who told her: “I feel alienated from my face. My face doesn’t feel like me. […] My adoptive mother looked at me like a stranger. I didn’t feel my face looked right. I couldn’t look at her and find me” (Beebe, 2004, p. 12). Indeed, adopted children, especially those who were not adopted immediately after birth, may experience an unbridgeable gap between the moment of their birth and the experience of finding themselves in the face of the other. This period, characterized by what might be called a mirroring vacuum, can be thought of as part of what creates the experience of nowhere-ness.

But is it only the child who moves between nowhere-ness, homelessness and being at home? In my experience, the adoptive parent moves between these states no less than the child. Each time the child excludes themselves from the sense of home, the parent too, as the home-giver, or the one who constitutes the home for this child, experiences a sense of being cast out and exiled. The shift, thus, is not the child’s alone, but also marks the parent-child dyad, which moves between the ability to create mutual belonging and a sense of disconnection, disintegration, and falling into a boundless space.

This reminds me of two landmarks in my son’s and my shared biography. During the first two years following his adoption, he used to ask me, several times a day, “Do you love me?” Although I answered him positively each time, it never reassured him for long, and an hour or two later he would ask me again: “Do you love me?” One day I heard him say from the other room: “You love me!” The question mark had changed into an exclamation mark. A parallel shift from question mark to exclamation mark happened in me, too. One day, when he was about two, I took him to the beach. We stood in the water, holding hands. Suddenly I saw that a huge jellyfish was about to attach itself to his leg. It was too late to move away. I lifted him up, and the jellyfish found its way to my leg instead. The pain was egregious; it took weeks of treatment until the sting healed. But inside me, this was a moment of great calm. The sense of homelessness and nowhere-ness had made space for a profound sense of being-at-home.

Durban writes:

Homelessness … arouses depressive and paranoid-schizoid anxieties which deal with relationships: their dangers, gains, and losses, while Nowhere-ness reflects several deeper archaic anxieties of-being, addressing the very threat to existence as a bounded, differentiated entity in body, time, space and object. These anxieties are typical to developmentally damaged early mental states and include experiences such as: falling forever, going to pieces, having no membrane or skin, being full of holes, losing orientation, having no relationship to the body, burning, freezing, liquefying, and dissolving. These anxieties give rise to two special defensive constellations—crumbling down as described by Meltzer in his concept of “dismantling” (1975), or hardening up, as in the case of the shell-type autistic child described by Tustin (1981). (Durban, 2017, p. 181)

In many adopted children, including my own, collapse or disintegration often takes active forms of inversion of the sensations that Durban describes: the experience of dissolving activates various forms of tightening the sides of the skin-container through actions such as hitting against hard surfaces. Later these attempts at containment are often joined by anti-social activities and delinquency that artificially brace the subject against a sense of flaccidity. These actions of friction, scorching, head-banging, and later, the breaching of social and moral boundaries, testify to the disruption of the work of mourning. The latter requires the stable presence of an object which can be released from the domain of concrete relations to form an internal representation. When the mourned object, however, was never present in the first place, what takes place is what I call blank mourning (Amir, 2020): various forms of corporeal clinging in lieu of the ability to represent. Banging one’s head against the wall, much like scorching or friction, come to achieve the fictive presence of a holding object or a skin envelope (Bick, 1968); rather than the representation of the absent object, these acts serve the concrete conservation of the object by means of friction with what allegedly stands in for its presence (Amir, 2020). Transgressive or delinquent behavior may be perceived as serving the same purpose, in so far as it is a form of constant friction against the container’s boundaries of the law. This friction produces the experience of a present object, one against which the friction occurs, while the delinquent behavior enables an illusory, concrete restitution of what was taken away, in a manner that makes mourning superfluous. I will discuss these manifestations of blank mourning below, as typical of “hypertonic” compensations for a profound “relational hypotonia.”

Mourning Alone

My son, like many children adopted mostly from the Soviet Union in those years, suffers from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (Jacobson & Jacobson, 2002; O’Learey, 2004), a syndrome which is the result of the biological mother’s excessive alcohol intake during pregnancy, and which affects fetal brain development. One of the typical consequences of this syndrome is what seems a lack of moral judgment and a difficulty internalizing social laws. But over and beyond an organic impairment of the capacity to judge, this difficulty involves a profound and early failure in the ability to mourn, the result of which is that instead of grieving for a lost object, the child attempts to magically create a prosthetic object which fills the internal objectal void by omnipotently appropriating the object of the other.

The most difficult of these failed attempts to mourn were, in my son’s case, the thefts. At first they were no more than occasional, petty pilfering. Small change that wasn’t returned, a money bill that most often I couldn’t tell for sure had even been there in the first place. Little by little his boldness and actions grew more serious. I got to the point where I feared leaving my handbag out of my sight. I constantly suspected him, even when he hadn’t done a thing. His response was always the same: remonstrating in anger, in tears, swearing upon his life, my life, his death. When caught in the act, he’d regularly fall back on the first year of his life as ammunition against anyone who stood against him, using it not only to justify the theft itself but also to point to our inability, the lucky ones born to parents who raised them, to understand what it was like to be him.

I could bear anything: the assorted substance abuses, the repeated attachments to young girls who took advantage of him and hurt him, the mood swings that took hold of him around any transition: from night to day, from inside to outside. But I couldn’t bear the impervious freedom he allowed himself, the indifference, as I experienced it, with which he stripped us not only of possessions—but also of the ability to believe him. I didn’t want to forgive, but nonetheless forgave, again and again. Until I understood that not only his pleas for forgiveness, but also my subsequent granting of it, were null and void.

Stealing wasn’t only an act of reclaiming something that he hadn’t ever experienced as belonging to him. It was also a form of exclusion of all those who surrounded him, their dispossession of an inherent, self-understood position of strength, of generosity (since the act of taking by force undermines first and foremost the act of giving voluntarily), of mercy. The deception was even more difficult than the theft. When it came to the latter it was possible, at least momentarily, to handle it by means of rationalization (to understand, to reformulate). But deceit left us irrevocably contaminated.

During the darkest of days, my psychic anguish took over my body. I developed repeated urinary tract infections that caused bleeding and sharp pains. I stopped drinking liquids out of fear of having to urinate. I scalded myself time and again, from pot handles, from the stream of hot water in the sink, from the oven. In two years, I underwent surgery for navel hernia, a biopsy of the thyroid gland and a breast biopsy. My thoughts kept straying toward death, not because I wanted to die but because I no longer knew how to love the life I had lived. I imagined it, death, as the shadow of a tree, as a brass bell, as a reservoir. I didn’t want to return.

Many stood by my side during that terrible time. And yet, I felt almost completely alone, a malicious and deafening wave of amassing hopelessness, of courage steadily fading away. One morning, after I looked for my son in the streets all night, he returned home defeated. I remember that he laid his head on the wrought-iron table in our garden and for a long time I gazed at the broad nape of his neck that suddenly seemed to me frighteningly narrow. Birds twittered their early morning twitters above the crowns of the trees, and a great darkness descended over us. He entreated me to lock him up, begged that I hospitalize him in a closed ward, pleaded for my life and for his. Instead, for 90 days and ninety nights I held onto him inside our home. Time moved simultaneously forward and backward: calendar time went ahead, the stubborn and ponderous time of everyday being, but the months were enumerated in reverse as well, leading him back to his infant size, releasing him from the utter silence: primitive gestures of grief but also of imagination, of hostility but also of innocence.

He didn’t return to the world, or left “the dark for the light,” nor was he “reborn.” In the end he burst open—in the sense of “cleaved” or “cracked”—from within the shell of his body. Cleaving has a different texture than reawakening or giving birth. It involves a fault, a splitting, a rupture. This rupture doesn’t turn into a thing of the past; it’s rather an exposed root needing constant attention. Like bits of eggshell stuck to the head of a chick, so the remnants of the act of rupture remained the only thing that mattered: an eternal teetering on the brink, which has no solution other than to forcefully, determinately, hang back.

Psychic Hypotonia and Hypertonia

The “hardening up” I mentioned earlier, which is enacted against the adopted child’s experience of dissolution and falling forever, is not only expressed in actions of the type I described here (banging the head on hard surfaces, friction with the boundaries of the law) but also characterizes an entire dimension of attachment unique to these children, which I relate to as psychic hypotonia and psychic hypertonia.

Pollak (2009) argues that the body’s holes and orifices, excepting the anus, are all located on the front of the body, creating what she calls a “frontal spine” (Pollak, 2009, p. 490). The openings along this spine face the other person’s openings. The vertebrae making up this frontal spine are junctions: not just between anatomic elements of the body-container, but also between the infant and mother who is facing it. This is an encounter in which a face-to-face relationship comes into being.

What exactly is this relationship?

While the back of the body is opaque and bony, the front side is soft and scattered with windows. This is why, when we want to make contact with a baby, we position ourselves right in front of the perceptual apertures in its face, in front of the body-windows which anatomically point out and ahead. When the mother nurses the baby, she intuitively supports both these sides: she concretely, physically supports the child from behind, while simultaneously offering emotional-communicative support from the front. This results in an infantile balance between active and passive, between what is held from behind and what turns-toward, engages, reaches out (Pollak, 2009).

When a mother turns her back to her baby, she turns away from the infant’s frontal spine, upending this equilibrium between being held and turning-toward, or yearning-for, between passive and active. The most conspicuous effect of this disruption involves what I call psychic tone. The word tonus or tone derives from the vocabulary of physiology, where “muscle tone” refers to the (ongoing) partial contraction of the body’s musculature. Normal muscle tone supports body posture. Abnormal states of tonicity are hypotonia—weaker-than-average basic tension—and hypertonia—when the muscles are excessively tense. Hypotonia and hypertonia are sometimes described as, respectively, flaccidity and spasticity (or rigidity), and are observed, at varying intensity, in neurological disorders.

What then would we call psychic tone?

Psychic tone is the partial contraction of the psyche’s muscles, which produces what we might call psychic posture. This tone is essentially bound up with the object’s primary manner of turning toward the infant’s frontal spine. The object’s very act of facing the infant prompts the infant to respond by way of “counter-intention,” triggering its psychic tone. An ongoing turning-away from the infant’s frontal spine, instead, undermines his or her psychic tone: rather than stimulating infants to direct themselves to the object, this turning-away triggers an empty, hollow attunement, one that addresses itself to a nonexistent addressee. So, while the repeated experience of turning-toward encourages psychic tone, a dearth of such experience leads to its weakening or even vanishing.

Psychic tone is a type of anchoring oneself in the other, but at the same time it involves a securing within the infantile subject itself, which is the outcome of the other’s turning toward him or her. From now on, this initial turning-toward will come into play in any of the subject’s attempts to address any object. No addressing of an object (human, conceptual or imaginary) is possible without psychic tone, since the very capacity to move toward already relies on, and in turn produces, psychic muscle tension.

Psychic hypotonia, as mentioned, is a slack, flaccid ability to aim at an object, or to maintain a psychic position that allows for any turning-toward as such, whether inward or outward. Manifestations of psychic hypotonia resemble blank (Green, 1996) or pre-objectal (Kristeva, 1987) depression, which, according to Kristeva, takes a more silent and passive form. Unlike the neurotic depression resulting from ambivalent feelings toward the lost object, she claims, this pre-objectal, narcissistic depression involves a grief that does not imply unconscious hostility toward a lost other. Rather, it is a grief originating in an incomplete, empty self. At stake here is not the loss of a whole object but of something more primitive, which rather resembles the loss of Winnicott’s (1974) environment-mother. The loss, in this case, is of something, not of someone. It has been registered before the subject was even someone, before, that is, he or she themselves amounted to a whole subject. It would therefore be more accurate to say that this type of depression is not about a loss, but about a primary absence, unnamable, unrepresented, too primitive to be linked to any definite object.

Psychic hypotonia is associated with the internalized presence of an object that turns away, since the latter attacks precisely the ability to direct oneself to, to turn-toward, to develop a psychic tone that allows for taking hold of an object. The vacant, hollow aspect of psychic hypotonia, therefore, relates to the subject’s inability to turn neither to themselves nor to the other, or in fact, to the way in which turning-away takes the place of turning-toward, and undermines it.

As a defense against the great helplessness characterizing psychic hypotonia, a phenomenon of psychic hypertonia can also occur. Here, turning-toward the object becomes adhesive (Meltzer, 1975). In this situation, the object is not recognized and met as separate and distinct, and thus, turning-toward becomes a one-dimensional clinging, resulting in friction with the object’s surface instead of a dialogue with its interior.

For many years, for instance, my son couldn’t fall asleep if his foot or hand didn’t touch another person’s skin. He needed the sense of concrete continuity between his body and another living body to feel that falling asleep did not mean falling forever. One such evening, he must have been about four, he said to me: “I am attached to you like the thorn to its rose.”

We usually encounter psychic hypotonia and hypertonia in the form of distinct opposing tendencies. In the case of several adopted children I have met, there seems to be a combination of both: adhesive clinging resulting from a desperate need for friction, along with a kind of vacant flaccidity, an infinite void which not even the adhesive object itself can fill.

This combination of psychic hyper- and hypotonia results in a pseudo-psychic three-dimensionality in which there appears to be a movement between a state of connection and a state of separation, while in fact there is a negation of both. Since psychic hypotonia is not a state of separation but of non-connection, whereas psychic hypertonia is not a state of connection but rather a state of adhesion which erases both the subject and the object to which the subject clings, both hypertonia and hypotonia constitute a negation of bonding and an attack on linking (Bion, 1959). We can say that hypotonia is the negative of separation, while hypertonia is the negative of connection. In both cases there is no possibility of maintaining a stable mental posture, nor a stable orientation toward an other.

This deceptive oscillation between psychic hypotonia and hypertonia is often evident in the adoptive parent as well. If the child’s psychic hypotonia manifests in a loose grip on the other as well as on him or herself, parental psychic hypotonia will be expressed in the parent’s recurring urge to give up and let go. And just as psychic hypertonia develops in the child as a defense against hypotonic laxity, so too does the parent sometimes develop defensive psychic hypertonia, which takes the form of over-protectiveness, vexing involvement, and efforts to control with a persecutory, compulsive quality.

How to turn this pseudo-three-dimensionality into a psychic space?

On Hospitality

In parenting traumatized adopted children, the crucial task is that of reversing the turning away to turning toward, thus enabling the psychic tonus to develop and strengthen. The only way to eventuate this reversal is to agree to host the raw traumatic materials in an unmediated way, regressing, we might say, to the mother’s primary hospitality of the fetus in her bodily container, holding it simultaneously as a stranger as well as the most welcome guest, and more than that—holding herself on the one hand as the most stable container, and on the other hand as the most flexible one, whose limits are ready to change irreversibly.

Derrida (2000) coined the term “hostipitality” (p. 3) which combines “hospitality,” a word of a troubled Latin origin, with “hostility”—its very contradiction that is incorporated into it. Hospitality, in its Derridean sense, is always a radical one: it means the ability to bring in what ultimately excludes us from the position of hosts. One can think, in Derrida’s terms, of adoption as a radical form of hospitality, one that challenges the limits of the host’s mind and body, but also allows, through this challenging, to truly let both the strange and the stranger in.

When I previously wrote about the function of the inner witness (Amir, 2012, 2014, 2018), I pointed to the infantile dependent state as what developmentally stimulates the infant’s need to deviate from total helplessness into being able to observe it and extract meaning from it. This deviation occurs through the infant’s ability to turn from the initial dyad to a third—concrete or imagined—that allows them to witness themselves by means of the vantage point it provides. The importance of the inner witness is related to the ability to transform excesses. The only way to transform excesses of any kind (pain, loss, anxiety) is to create a vantage point in relation to it: to turn the nameless dread (Bion, 1962) into one that has a name and meaning.

Stern (2022) explores the formulation of experience, which depends upon the metamorphosis of experience from not-me to feels-like-me, suggesting that the movement from not-me to feels-like-me happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the midst of this process—that is, when we know and feel that it is we who are doing the knowing and feeling. Pivnick (2013), describing something similar, writes about the possibility of adoptees and their families to move from feeling “lost in translation” to feeling “found in relation” (p. 60). This transition from not-me to feels-like-me, or from being lost in translation to feeling found in relation, is related to the willingness of the other for radical hospitality: when the adoptive parent is ready to challenge the limits of his or her body and mind, and instead of accepting the child into a pre-prepared space—to recreate the hosting space itself, the child also learns to create him-or- herself as a vivid container.

The Little Dreamer

For my son, this shift from the state of not-me to the state of feels-like-me, in Stern’s words, was embodied in two unique gestures, both of which, at least to a certain degree, were addressed to me: one was his insistence on unique language disruptions, which testified to both his inherent foreignness and uniqueness, preventing their erasure; the other was his capacity to dream.

When he began to speak, I was filled with delight: at last, he is speaking in my own tongue. But he adopted, in his great wisdom, a distorted speech. He seemed to deliberately err in the use of the singular and plural, jumbling declensions and conjugations. At first, I foolishly corrected, over and again, his mistakes. I tried to domicile him in my own tongue, as though his capacity to belong to me was dependent on it. He refused to be corrected. To himself he would repeatedly jumble up the rules of grammar, creating endless loops of errors upon errors until I relented, finally understanding that correcting his speech had a far more destructive effect in terms of his capacity to belong than what I experienced as his linguistic defects. And yet, I experienced it as defective. His making mistakes in the language that was so precious to me made me slow down in the face of this sharp turning away from me. Only in time did I grasp that what I understood as a turning away was in effect a turning toward me. That he turned toward me in such a fashion, by making constant mistakes, in order to establish between us what I’d sought to exclude from our common ground: the foreignness that no common language has the power to erase.

Into his dreams—from which early on he’d startle awake terrorized, often a dozen times in one night—there penetrated a strange amalgam of past and future memories: he is trapped inside the TV screen, which I unsuspectingly switch off; he is flushed into the toilet bowl; he is held in my arms as my face suddenly turns into a monster, a fiend, a witch. Other dreams occurred alongside such nightmares, saturated with grief. When my mother died, he dreamt that upon arriving at my parents’ home she greets him as always. “We haven’t gotten together for such a long time,” she tells him, “How come?” And he remains silent for he doesn’t want to expose her to the fact of her death.

The passage from life to death, from presence to absence, was entrusted into his small hands from seemingly forever. In light of what he’d gone through he knew what the adults around him refused to know, and hence he knew what he knew in its naked and murky rawness, without their consoling mediation. The notion of “before its time” was connected both to his early and mature experiences. Everything was before its time, simply because his development had been reversed: death preceded life, absence preceded any form of presence.

Dreams were thus his way to reverse the direction. For as a dreamer he dreamt flawlessly. His dreams were void of shadows and bereft of secrets. They set themselves in place before him—but also before me, since he was in the habit of recounting them to me every morning—as what exists out of our reach, which precisely for that reason struck roots in us. Shards of the quotidian seemed, alongside such dreams, as bleak lights on distant hills. They couldn’t blur what the dreams themselves lit up from one end to another: the unassailable mystery of abandonment.

But dreaming also saved him. With the blinking of an eye upon waking, his wide-open lids seized in part the overlapping ends of the inner and outer, an overlaying that formed an indissoluble bond between the two worlds. In this way minute bits of daylight penetrated the gloom of night. The blue door of the toy closet cast from time to time sheaves of color on the closed lid of the coffin in which he was locked. The sun-drenched windowsill, on which there sat a happy row of furry dolls, naturally extended the railroad tracks anticipating the train that threatened to run over him. Alongside the worried look on his face there appeared in time flickering moments of inexplicable joy, which were possibly connected with the simple fact that the days began and ended without his being dropped; that the catastrophic severance dividing the time of the birth of the body and the time of the birth of the soul was stitched back together, at least to a degree, by means of the thread woven between sleep and wakefulness.

I never loved him more than I loved him when he woke from a dream: for a brief moment, partially baked in his sleep’s thick webs, he let me, too, bridge the act of abandonment with that of salvation (since for him, not knowing any other mother, I had always been both: the mother who deserted him and the mother who gathered him unto her bosom); the sin alongside the atonement of sin (for the sin of abandonment, from the moment it becomes a possibility, is the possible sin of all mothers); the fact of life, related to his actual coming into the world, with the spirit of life, which is what could only be given to him by the power of my love.

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Notes on contributors

Dana Amir

Dana Amir, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst at the Israel psychoanalytic society, full professor, vice dean for research and head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanalysis at Haifa University, editor in chief of Maarag—the Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, poetess and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry books, two memoirs in prose and four psychoanalytic non-fiction books (+ more than 50 articles): Cleft Tongue (Karnac, 2014), On the Lyricism of the Mind (Routledge, 2016), Bearing Witness to the Witness (Routledge, 2018) and Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language: Clinical Cases on the Edge (Routledge, 2021), and Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality (Routledge, in print). She is the winner of many literary as well as academic prizes, including five international psychoanalytic awards.

Notes

¹ Of course, the birth parent who gave a child away could also experience this actual child as a phantom object.