Working with Adopted Women via Pictures, Drawings and Dreams: A Novel Approach

This chapter presents a composite of eight different women who were my clients and had so much in common, not only in terms of personal history, but also in terms of symptoms, disorders, interpersonal relationships, and symbiotic relationships with their mothers and men in their lives, that I felt it was begging to be labelled the "There is not enough syndrome." In this chapter, I will refer to the subject as “S,” but she is a composite of these women, all of whom were between the ages of 25 and 32 at the time of therapy, and who were in therapy for seven months to a year, during which time they all improved enough to leave therapy and live as independent successful professional young women. From the time they were born until they were three years old, all eight young women were adopted from an orphanage in a South American country. They were all unaware of the their mother's identity. The adopting mothers were between the ages of 40 and 55 at the time of the adoption. These women are now all retired or nearing retirement age, and they are all working mothers. During therapy, I painted and sketched pictures that depicted the challenges and problems that the young ladies revealed, and these are given in this paper.