LIMA, Shaienie Monise. Adoption and Belonging: A Look at the Personal Experience of the Adopted Child. (2025). Dissertation (Master’s) – Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2025.
Available on: https://doi.org/10.11606/D.47.2025.tde-23092025-105300
Abstract: One of the major challenges encountered in adoption is enabling the child to experience the home as a true home. A space in the world can only be perceived as a field to be explored when the child feels they have a place and a sense of dwelling within their own body and within the caregiver’s body. It is from this experience of belonging that one can engage with the world with creativity and desire, and thus inhabit it. This research aims, within a psychoanalytic framework, to understand the effects of double filiation on the subjectivity and sense of belonging of adopted children, considering that, in most cases, this separation involves a permanent rupture of original bonds. This is a psychoanalytic study, situated within an intersubjective paradigm of science, and its therefore qualitative in nature. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with adopted children and their parents. In addition, the Drawing-of-Family-and-Story Procedure, developed by Walter Trinca (1972), was employed.