The term ‘adoption’ enters the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct vectors, none of which fully overlap. The most sustained engagement occurs within the behavioural genetics and addiction literature, where adoption studies serve as the privileged methodological instrument for disentangling genetic from environmental determinants of psychopathology. Gabor Maté offers the most rigorous critique of this methodology, arguing that the stressed circumstances compelling a biological mother to relinquish her child already constitute a prenatal environmental variable, thereby confounding the genetic inference adoption studies are designed to isolate. A second, wholly distinct register appears in classical scholarship: Erwin Rohde documents adoption in ancient Greek practice as a ritual mechanism for securing perpetual care of the ancestor’s soul, forging an indissoluble bond between inheritance, cult obligation, and family continuity. Theologically, John of Damascus and the Philokalic tradition deploy ‘adoption’ (huiothesia) as a pneumatological category—the Spirit of adoption by which the baptised cry ‘Abba, Father’—sharply distinguished from ontological Sonship. Winnicott’s bibliography preserves a clinical trace: his 1954 paper ‘Pitfalls in Adoption’ signals a psychoanalytic concern with the adoptive relational matrix. Across these registers, adoption functions simultaneously as legal fiction, soteriological gift, epidemiological confound, and developmental crucible—a term that reveals, in each disciplinary context, a foundational anxiety about origins, belonging, and the transmissibility of pathology or grace.
Any woman who has to give up her baby for adoption is, by definition, a stressed woman… A proclivity for addiction is one possible consequence.
Maté argues that the prenatal stress borne by mothers who relinquish infants for adoption is itself an environmental variable that corrupts adoption studies’ claim to isolate genetic determinants of addiction.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008thesis
If a child is adopted, so the argument goes, he brings with him the genes he received from his parents but is now being raised in an entirely different environment… that, upon inspection, is a rather enormous ‘if.’
Maté deconstructs the logical premise of adoption study methodology, demonstrating that the supposed environmental neutrality of the adoptive context is scientifically untenable.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008thesis
The motive of adoption is said in the clearest possible terms to be the desire on the part of the adopter for a permanent care of his own soul at the hands of his adopted son.
Rohde establishes that in ancient Greek practice adoption was a cultic and eschatological institution—a mechanism for guaranteeing ongoing soul-care after death through a ritually installed heir.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
If ADHD is a genetic disorder, the parents of children with the problem should show a higher frequency of ADHD, antisocial personality, or alcoholism than the adopting parents.
Blum deploys adoption study design as positive evidence for the genetic transmission of ADHD and reward deficiency, standing in methodological contrast to Maté’s critique.
, Attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and reward deficiency syndrome, 2008supporting
ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. This is the name granted to us, who believe, through the sacrament of regeneration; our confession of the faith wins us this adoption.
John of Damascus presents pneumatic adoption as a soteriological category conferred through baptismal regeneration, distinct from natural filiation and constitutive of Christian identity.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
we were once sons of wrath, but have been made sons of God through the Spirit of adoption, and have earned that title by favour, not by right of birth.
Damascus elaborates the theological contrast between adoptive sonship—achieved by grace and faith—and ontological Sonship, using this distinction to defend Trinitarian orthodoxy against subordinationist readings.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
the name of Son is not attached to Christ as a customary appendage due to adoption, seeing that it is essential to salvation.
Damascus argues that Christ’s Sonship cannot be adoptive in nature, because if it were, the confession of that name—which is necessary for salvation—would rest on a legal fiction rather than ontological truth.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
Pitfalls in Adoption. Medical Press, 232. Also in (108). Two Adopted Children (Talk given to Assoc. Child Care Officers).
Winnicott’s bibliography documents his sustained clinical attention to the specific psychological hazards of adoptive placement, situating adoption as a distinct object of psychoanalytic inquiry within the facilitating environment framework.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting
The second stage, adoption, represents an explicit intention to try an innovation. While this might be a formal decision made by program leadership, it also includes subtle levels of commitments made by individual staff members.
Simpson employs ‘adoption’ as a technical term within a technology-transfer framework for drug treatment, designating the stage at which practitioners formally or informally commit to implementing an evidence-based innovation.
, A conceptual framework for drug treatment process and outcomes, 2004supporting
One obvious example comes from the adoption of systems of political and economic governance that were originally meant to respond constructively to extensive social suffering but ended up producing human catastrophes.
Damasio uses ‘adoption’ in its colloquial sense of cultural uptake to illustrate how homeostatic intentions can produce dysregulatory outcomes when governance systems are poorly conceived or implemented.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018aside
A married couple decides that they would like to have a child… Although their attempts to conceive are not successful in the first 6 months, they do not take much notice.
Pargament introduces a vignette of infertility and implicit consideration of adoption as an illustrative case of tertiary appraisal and the psychology of coping with thwarted reproductive goals.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside