Depuis quelques années, l’adoption internationale s’est essentiellement focalisée sur les enfants dits « à besoins spécifiques », en raison leur âge et/ou de leur état de santé, ainsi que pour respecter les principes de la Convention de La Haye. Ce nouveau visage de l’adoption internationale expose davantage à des situations à risque d’un point de vue de l’attachement et de la construction de liens. Un cas clinique articulé au traumatisme viendra illustrer, d’une part, ce qui peut venir faire obstacle au processus filiatif dans la confrontation entre l’enfant réel et l’enfant imaginaire et la mise à mal du caregiving. Et d’autre part, le travail thérapeutique rendu nécessaire pour remobiliser les ressources psychiques de tous les protagonistes afin de créer différemment le lien de filiation adoptive. Dans le contexte actuel de l’adoption internationale, l’accompagnement préventif sur des moments critiques vise à dénouer les difficultés à faire famille, à éviter les ruptures ou les points de fixation rigide de pensées, et enfin à favoriser des liens plus sereins de filiation et de parentalité.

In recent years, in order to respect the principles of the 1993 Hague Convention, international adoption has focused on children with “special needs”. These children are difficult to adopt because of their personal situation or their state of health. International adoption leads adoptive parents to move to a foreign country with unknown language, customs, culture and administrative formalities, leading to a feeling of loss of control, placing them in a vulnerable position. Some international adoptions cause real suffering for both the adopted child and his/her parents, especially when trauma disrupts the filiation process.

The objective is to understand, from a clinical vignette, how filiation process is implemented in case of trauma. It means, to understand how parents can integrate the real child and recognize themselves in him or her and how the adopted child with traumatic injuries can build a bond of love and trust to others.

Clinical observation concerns a girl, abandoned at birth by her mother and who was victim on the second day of life, of an attempted murder with machetes. The child has been placed in an orphanage since that day. The aggression had serious after effects, not only physically but also psychologically. Thus, since the age 3 years, she has developed self-destructive behaviors with endangerments, including life-threatening situations. The first meeting between this child, aged 6, and her adoptive parents takes place at the orphanage. Not supported in this approach, parents are confronted with the relational difficulties of their adoptive daughter. Very isolated in a foreign country, they feel a deep uneasiness and they question the validity of the adoption process, causing shame and guilt and even suicidal ideation. Once in France, the girl adapts quickly to the culture of her new country. Psychotherapy undertaken to put into words the emotions and the behaviors allows an appeasement in the family relations and the disappearance of violent agitations. But the process of filiation, still hampered by the trauma of this violent first meeting, requires the pursuit of psychotherapy to allow parents to accept the loss of the object, here the imaginary child and the parental ideal.

From this clinical observation, it appears that the first interactions between parents and adopted child play an important role in the construction of relationship. The parents welcome the child with a set of fantastical representations that reveal the place that has been given to him. Adaptation will be done by psychic movements, by comparing and relativizing the imagined child with the real child. It is a double movement of adaptation of both parents and child. In the mourning of the imaginary child, there is also the mourning of the perfect parent; it is in the articulation of these two losses that the depressive state of the baby blues arises. This baby blues can evolve into psychotrauma in case of confrontation with the violence of reality. Thirty percent of adopted children have, at the time of adoption, disorganized attachment patterns; but adoption would most often enable recovery through the mobilization of parents’ psychic abilities and their own attachment patterns. Hence, a necessary assistance for parents.

In the current context of international adoption, it is important to provide prevention with specialized places and trained teams in order to recognize critical situations, help families and enable filiation process to take place.