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Graphic: Teresa Jordan

Graphic: Teresa Jordan

Our body-selves in adoption:
Charting responsibilities

Dr Trevor Jordan, BA, BD, PhD
Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics
School of Humanities & Human Services
Queensland University of Technology

 Paper delivered at
2nd National Conference on the Mental Health Aspects of Persons Affected by Family Separation
Brisbane, October, 2004

Whether or not there is always dis-ease, there is certainly un-ease at the heart of adoption. It is not easy losing a child to adoption, it is not easy creating a family by adoption and it is not easy growing up adopted. How we respond to this un-ease provides us with ethical opportunities; that is, opportunities to ‘affirm who we are, to whom we are connected and what matters enough to care about and care for’ (Walker 1998).

At the centre of this un-ease peculiar to adoption are problems of embodiment, as we work out the implications of biological relatedness for our responsibilities towards each other. How important is biological relatedness to our wellbeing? One way to answer this question is look closely at the connections between the body, illness and ethics and see how they might apply to adoption experiences.

Our stories, our selves

The natural history of human intimacy presents us with two seemingly contradictory facts: at times biology matters and at other times biology doesn't matter. Mostly, families are founded on intimate relations between two individuals who are not genetically related yet who choose to care for each other. Out of this social commitment comes a genetic link to past and future generations.  (Of course, the biological reductionist will still insist that we couple out of a biological imperative to reproduce; however, this does not explain why I don’t abandon my wife after we have successfully raised our children). Despite this ability to socially construct intimate relations, a sense of genetic connection does seem to influence our capacity to care, particularly across generations.

To maintain that biology has no affect at all on identity, values and relationships requires a particular kind of understanding of the nature of persons—an understanding based on the idea of a mind-body split. For example, a view that a real or higher self (the self of the mind) is not marred by the realities, the imperfections, of the material body is what adoptees grow up with (consciously or unconsciously). Biology doesn’t count. Indeed, this disembodied self is what the closed records systems of the past inscribed in law. Yet adoptees know that their adoptive parents do not really subscribe to the view that biological connection does not count; after all, they first tried to have ‘of their own’.

Charting our responsibilities to those whom we are biologically related means getting beyond this mind-body dualism that shapes our institutions—educational  legal, political, spiritual. To do so, we need to move the boundary of self-definition out from the isolated ego (the thinking self) to a richer understanding of a person as a self embodied in a story over time, and embedded within a network of social relations.

We might call these two loci of human identity a narrative sense of self and a relational sense of self.  Self-expression calls for stories. Consider what we do when we tell each other who we are. We recount where have we come from, where are we going, to whom we are related and what we are doing. We tell our story. This story embodies our values, for ‘we learn morality by learning who we are, to whom we are connected and what matters enough to care about and care for’ (Walker 1998, 201).

Adoption certainly fosters story-telling. There are many memoirs written by members of the adoption triad, and many support groups exist in which we can recount our own adoption story. One advantage of telling our own stories is that we don’t have to hand them over to professionals. In asserting mental health harms, for example, we bring our personal narratives within the dominant narratives of helping professionals. This is not necessarily a bad thing; however, we need to be mindful that it can involve a disempowering loss of control over our own stories.

Naturally, separation from those to whom we are biologically related can profoundly affect one’s sense of self as an embodied being. It is a loss experienced at the bodily level, sometimes referred to as a ‘primal wound’ (Verrier 1991). Such an experience of loss or wounding is not only a significant event in itself, it also sets up moral choices. How we respond to this loss can define who we are, who we care for, and what we care about. To help understand the different choices which adoption experiences present, I draw on the work of Arthur Frank; in particular, his book The Wounded Storyteller, which explores the connections between the body, illness and ethics in the experiences of those who are sick. Frank deals mainly with physical illness, but his insights apply equally to mental illness and, I would argue, to the less definable states we negotiate in adoption, which I have referred to as un-ease. Events such as illness, adoption and other forms of family separation evoke stories. If these events involve uncertainty, fear, fatigue and pain, they can render us ‘narrative wrecks’; that is, they can affect our ability to form a secure self-identity through what is told or recounted. According to Frank (1995, 53), ‘Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she is may be going.’ I contend that the same applies to the experience of separation through adoption. 

Our body-selves: four general problems

Adoption presents its own specific challenges with respect to what Frank (1995, 29) has called four general problems of embodiment: control, body-relatedness, other-relatedness and desire.

Firstly, our body-selves try to act out working solutions to problems of predictability and control. Our bodies have varying capacities for control and we define our selves (and others define us) accordingly. An unplanned pregnancy and adoption connotes a loss of predictably and control. It is a reminder that we are embodied beings, subject to contingency and limitations. The pregnancy is unplanned. There may be a threat to a promising career, a life turned upside down. Contingency, the lack of control of biology, naturally had greater everyday impact on the birth mother, rather than the birth father. While society may at times help us to overcome these bodily limitations, some of them are added to by the body’s social embeddedness in class, ethnicity, gender or history. Certain options and opportunities were simply not available in the past, or were not available to certain groups of people such as the poor and the unwed.

The expectation of society is that the body-self should control nature, rather than nature control it. Loss of control is stigmatising and requires special effort to be managed. ‘When adult bodies lose control, they are expected to attempt to regain it if possible, and if not then at least to conceal the loss as effectively as possible’ (Frank 1995, 31, emphasis mine). Does this sound familiar? Perhaps we can understand, then, how the body (the birth parent, the child at birth, the infertile parent) came to be hidden away. And to keeps their secrets these bodies must become subject to the discipline of self and others.

Body-relatedness is, according to Frank, another problem for the body-self. This body we have, is it ours or is it us? How does the conscious self relate to the body and its demands, problems and opportunities? One possibility is for the self to become dissociated from the body; that is, to see the body as an object, a mere possession or receptacle and to reject it, to find no pleasure in it, or to neglect to feed it. At the other extreme is the possibility of being fully associated with the body, of attending to its every need or desire. Adoption experience seems to go either way depending, again, on the type of social experience in which the body is embedded. For some birth mothers, relinquishing a child can be the trigger for a lifetime of dissociation from the body. The experience of infertility may also lead adoptive parents to completely deny the relevance of biology, and they may thus unwittingly influence their children to dissociate from their bodies, to play down their body-selves’ relatedness to others.

Other-relatedness is how the body relates to other bodies. ‘How does our shared corporeality affect who we are, not only to each other, but specifically for each other? (Frank 1995, 35) According to Frank, the body may respond by being dyadic, oriented towards the other, or monadic, separate and alone. Other-regard is, of course, central to ethics and it is founded in the body’s experience shared corporeality, of relatedness to others. The shared condition of being bodies, Frank tells us, often evokes empathy, shared fellow-feeling, and care for the other. In the past, however, unplanned conceptions were not configured in these empathetic ways, but reconfigured as selfishness and a lack in consideration. The type of care administered to the unwed and wed mothers was at times staggeringly different. Whereas pregnancy would usually bring people together in celebration, social forces led the single pregnant mother to be separated from others, not allowed to mix with other pregnant women and often sequestered into homes with others of their unwed kind.

The last general problem of embodiment Frank draws our attention to is desire. This is the body’s capacity to want more than it needs. It has been described as the gap between the hunger and the want in a baby’s cry. Desire cannot be filled, there is always more. Desire, of course, has been seen as a root problem in adoption. Some unwed mothers were labelled as ‘boy crazy’. The excess of desire of the birth parents was deemed to be inappropriate, and the product of that inappropriate desire, the child, had to be transferred to the infertile couple whose desires were legitimate, but unfulfilled. If desire is a problem for the body, so is its opposite the lack of desire. Usually, an unplanned pregnancy is not the more that was intended. This may seriously affect one’s later capacity for productive desire, impacting on one’s ability to form and sustain intimate relationships. Lack of desire can also be expressed through a quality of resignation, or a more or less continual feeling of putting life on hold.

Reunions, for their part, can reawaken desire; our desires, our need for more, can run riot. Reunions, however, are seldom symmetrical. There is usually a searcher and a non-searcher and, thus, a mismatch of desires. A birth parent or child who expresses no desire for information or contact has learned one response to the general problem of desire—don’t seek for more, be content with what you have. On the other hand, the birth parent or child who lets romanticism and unrealistic fantasies dominate will find that reality cannot fulfil their desires either. Unfortunately, as a result of these unfulfilled desires the other party may end up being diminished in their sight.

According to Frank, these general problems of embodiment—control, body-relatedness, other-relatedness and desire—present challenges and set up different choices, which are acted out through four different types of body-selves: the disciplined body, the mirroring body, the dominating body and the communicative body. Each body type responds to physical, psychical and social wounding in a different way. These same body-selves, I would argue, also attend the un-ease of adoption

The disciplined body

This body-self ‘defines itself in actions of self-regimentation’; it is focused on problems of control. Loss of control presents a crisis; the disciplined body reasserts itself through predictability and compliance. This transforms the body into an ‘it’, an object to be controlled, and the self becomes dissociated from this ‘it’. The disciplined body lacks desire. It does not want more; it wants to control what it has.  It is unlikely to tell stories about itself. That would risk getting out of control. It is compliant. Disciplined body-types make great patients and ‘good’ adoptees. This body-self can be a ritualist, at the personal level obsessive and compulsive or, at the more acceptable social level, meticulous. ‘Expectations are surprisingly low’, because emphasis is on performing correctly, not on achievement.

In the appropriate context, some of these attributes would be highly effective. Nevertheless, as Frank (1995, 43) warns, ‘As a pure ideal type the disciplined body is not a pleasant way to live.’ It is monadic, separate and alone. Its moral orientation it not so much towards others, as towards self-control.’

The mirroring body

The mirroring body-self ‘defines itself as a site of consumption’ (Frank 1995, 43). The body is fed, clothed, groomed and indulged. It is mirroring because ‘it attempts to recreate the body in the images of other bodies’; in particular, more stylish, healthier or socially esteemed bodies. It seeks predictability of appearance and fears the body’s contingency. It must be constantly updated, repaired and re-presented. It fears disfigurement. It grooms itself in conformity to an idealised set of ideal images.

Frank argues that mirroring bodies are also monadic. Although it ‘finds its course in the performance expectations of others who are its audience’, the mirroring body acts alone in a world that is judging it (1995, 44). It is compulsively associated with its body, but the body as a surface. It is a body which must, at all cost, be like others. The mirror-self as a self does not need it own story; it is a self which finds the story of the popular culture sufficient.

The dominating body

The dominating body-self defines itself by force. It meets the challenge of a critical event, such as illness or separation, by trying to beat it. The voice and narrative is dominated not by resignation but by anger. The dominating body, Frank argues, is dissociated and lacking desire, but it is dyadic. Wherever the body-self comes up against limits and restrictions, the dominating body displaces its rage against those limits on to others. This may lead to emotionally abusive and possessive behaviour. It turns against others, its aggressions reflecting ‘the bitterness of the body’s loss of desire’ (Frank 1995, 48). This bitterness comes from the recognition of the fact that in some situations it cannot get more but must settle for less.

The communicative body

Clearly, the first three body-types are problematic from an ethical point of view as they undermine social relationships which embody care and responsibility. However, the final type—the communicative body—is qualitatively different. It attempts to embody the ethical imperative; that is, to live a life embedded in relationships which are other-regarding. The disciplined, mirroring and dominating bodies are ideal types, extreme examples of body-selves, but the communicative body is also an idealised type. ‘Its specifications are not only descriptive but provide an ethical ideal for bodies’ (Frank 1995, 48). This body type ‘accepts its contingency as part of the fundamental contingency of life.... Bodily predictability, if not the exception, should be regarded as exceptional; contingency ought to be accepted as normative’ (Frank 1995, 49). The communicative body ‘is fully associated with itself.’ Biological and social responsibility are intertwined. It is never a case of mind over matter; what happens to the body pervades the whole of life. The communicative body needs others. We not only nurture others but are nurtured in return. In the absence of such healthy relationships we employ the defensive strategies of the other types of body-selves, which lead to isolation, anger and keeping up appearances. The communicative body, on the other hand, struggles to express a range of values such as care, honesty, justice, loyalty, accountability, integrity, faithfulness, the pursuit of excellence, respect for others and responsible citizenship—to name but a few.

This communicative body is productive of desire in the crucial sense that it identifies with the suffering and tribulations in the bodies of others. Suffering, in its various forms, is the inevitable consequence of the body’s contingency, and the productive desire for more which the communicative body marshals to meet it is service. ‘When the body is a desiring one, the person wants and needs to relieve the suffering of others....The communicative body feels an obligation towards the other. It never constructs itself alone but constructs its humanity in relation to other bodies’ (Frank 1995, 49). The communicative body ‘realises the ethical ideal of existing for the other.’ It could be called the communing body. ‘Bodies commune in touch, in tone, in facial expression and gestural attitude, and in breath....Communication is less a matter of content than of alignment: when bodies sense themselves in alignment with others, words make sense.’ Without alignment, misinterpretation is possible.  Communicative bodies tell stories; they give testimony.

Because the communicative body is present both to itself and others, it has ‘a sense of ownership’ of situations. ‘Responsibility as an ethical person involves making a good story of the situation that self and other find themselves in and must come to own’ (Frank 1995, 50). The body itself is the message, Frank tells us. We want ‘to be a good story for others.’ (How well this resonates with a good, or ethical, reunion experience.)

Embodying values in the adoption experience

‘Each of us’, says Frank, ‘ is not one type or another, but a shifting foreground and background of types. So, having tuned in to these body-types, how do we read the body’s significance in the adoption experience, and what choices and responsibilities flow from it?

According to Frank (1995, 47), ‘Each body type is an ethical strategy’. Clearly, as Frank has presented it, the communicative body is prescriptive; in adoption, we ought to be communicative bodies. The first three forms of body-selves, however, are problematic from an ethical point of view. On the face of it, these body-selves seem to be detrimental to social relationships which embody care and responsibility because of their level of dissociation and the fact that they are either not other-relating or relate to others in negative and oppressive ways. Yet, it is surprising how much these body-selves have dominated the past of adoption; or, rather, these body-selves have shaped the moralism which typified individuals and institutional responses in the past. Past practices seem to have been characterised by discipline, domination and the need to keep up appearances, leading to experiences of isolation, regimentation, resignation, anger, lack of desire and the diminishment of self and other.

Disciplined bodies in adoption

For the disciplined body, ethical challenges are issues of control. It is easy to see how adoption experiences evoked the need to re-establish control. Disciplining the self offered the road to moral recovery—to be disciplined, to accept discipline, to be chastised, to be made pure. Some un-disciplined bodies disciplined themselves; other un-disciplined bodies were disciplined by others. A large part of the response to an unplanned pregnancy in the past was to re-establish control though disciplining the wayward body and instituting a plan for both the mother and child. Parents, whose responsibility its was to discipline, usually reasserted their control over a pregnant woman, even though she was often an adult. If the parents would not do it, other bodies would. Consider, for example, the stated objectives of the Magdalene Asylums run by the Sisters of Mercy in Queensland: ‘to train the wayward, uncontrollable and erring, to habits of self restraint by necessary instruction and kind but firm discipline’ (Brisbane Centenary souvenir, 1921 quoted in Arthur 2002, 1). The problem, ethically speaking, with discipline imposed by others is that it limits self-responsibility.

Although self-discipline can at times play a positive role in expressing value—it can help us to care, to be accountable, and to be just—it is difficult to be other-regarding where there is only control and constraint. Self-discipline, too, is primarily self-regarding rather than other-regarding. Self-discipline, like discipline by others, can result in feelings of social and physical isolation. The discipline of secrecy and silence about one’s past was essential to recovering and maintaining one’s purity. Of course, one’s past was not really changed in the process. From the point of view of the disciplined body as the maintainer of secrets, to re-open the past through search and reunion is to risk losing control again and to reverse the effects of years of self-imposed discipline. Maintaining secrets can leave a legacy of anxiety and isolation. There is a high price to be paid in dissociation. ‘Parents and adopted people often find themselves leading what feels like a double life. They carry a secret knowledge which they feel is socially unacceptable and they live with the fear of discovery’ (Robinson 2004, 13).

There is a risk that the disciplined body’s response to adoption experience can lead to the body being seen as something to be controlled rather than cared for. Consequently, the disciplined body is in danger of lacking desire. It will not seek out more, but control what it has and seek even less by diminishing the bodily impulses which lead it astray and ultimately diminishing the self. Such diminishment has profound ethical consequences, as it necessarily means turning away from others. (Anyone who has tried to maintain a diet or other regimen in the midst of a busy social life will have experienced this sense of isolation. And how much more difficult it can be to maintain those regimens in the presence of one’s family.) Disciplined bodies can be compliant, and birth mothers and adoptees can pour themselves into their work, with high achievement as an unintended consequence. Infertility also leads to regimens of diet and disciplined commitment to procedures. Those wanting to adopt are also submitted to control and discipline through waiting lists and assessments.

Law, of course, is the ultimate form of discipline. There is nothing wrong with seeking legal clarity about parental roles; but to have laws, as we did in the past, that criminalise contact between related individuals or render birth relatives non-existent to each other, seems a severe form of discipline. Without information, people cannot exercise their responsibilities; even the most basic moral behaviour--care, honesty, accountability, respect for others—is seriously curtailed. Rather than being other-regarding, laws that prejudicially restrict people’s freedom to associate, on the sole basis of the circumstances of their birth, pander to self-regarding instincts such as anxiety, fear, isolation, and other uncaring attitudes and behaviours. Enlightened policies should encourage people to form relationships through which they can exercise virtues such as honesty, care, responsibility, accountability, respect for others, and justice.

Mirroring bodies and adoption

The mirroring body, as we have seen, defines itself as a site of consumption. In its most extreme form we have instances of celebrity adoptions, the acquisition of instant families in the midst of busy careers. We occasionally even hear stories of women wanting to adopt because it will be better for their figure than a home-grown birth. Alarming though such reports are, they are rare. The mirroring body’s more usual response to the ethical challenges of adoption is simply to keep up appearances. Keeping up appearances is, perhaps, a quintessentially bourgeois attitude; it is the middle class body-self (made in the multiple images of others) writ large. One of the defining features of adoption in the western culture in the late twentieth century was the desire to create a family ‘just like other families’. The closed system implied that no one need ever know. Policies of attempted matching of children to families helped them to mirror so-called normal families.

Ethically speaking, however, this desire to be like other families is problematic. Ought not we try to be the family we truthfully are? A desire to be like other families means paying disproportionate attention to the surface aspects of family life, and not giving due consideration to what is happening at deeper emotional levels—augmenting another problem of middle class family life in general.

The mirroring body-self is a serious challenge for inter-racial families. Firstly, intercountry adoption has to struggle against the perception of being defined by consumption, one of the characteristics of the mirroring body. As intercountry adoption usually involves the transfer of children from poor countries or situations to more wealthy ones, it has been tainted with the notion that the affluent are gaining children through relative financial advantage. One response to the arrival of a child from another race is for the whole family to redefine itself as a multiracial family. This may prove difficult, however, depending on one’s social context. In some communities multiracial identities abound, and the contingencies of race are mirrored back in tolerant or acceptable ways, and one is, indeed, a family like any other. But in other local communities, the images reflected back are not so positive.  The mirrors (attitudes and ideals) which support multiracial identity are often ideological and abstract; as such, they are readily available to the parents but not too the developing child, whose needs for recognition are concrete. Within the confines of the family there is affirmation and positive image, but this may not be reinforced in the social environment. The attempt to structure an acceptable mirror culture for the child, through exposure to their culture of origin, may work successfully for a while, until the age when identities must be asserted autonomously. Then the emerging adult finds that he or she is an anomalous other, at home in neither culture.

Adoption itself has become part of the hall of distorted mirrors that is popular culture. Reunion stories abound, and many birth parents and adoptees feel a new social pressure to fulfil social expectations defined by the entertainment industry. The most recent media exploitation of this was the proposed airing of a reality TV show in the USA based on an adoptee trying to guess which of a number of men was her birth father. The show was withdrawn after a significant groundswell of complaint from the adoption community.

Despite these extreme negative instances, the mirroring body-self is important when it comes to seeking out information and reunion. M. Cichini (1993, in Cole 2003, 131), for example, found that 91% of birth fathers agreed that one reason for searching was ‘to find out what my child looks like.’ Usually, this is only one factor among many. Certainly, if this was the only reason for searching, the mirroring body would be ill-prepared to for the emotional issues that might arise.

If the dominant feeling of the mirroring body is that the world is judging it, then it will try as hard as possible to avoid that judgment by fitting in. It is not so surprising, then, how conservative some birth parents and adoptees can become.

Dominating bodies and adoption

The dominating body-self’s response to the ethical challenges of adoption is anger and abuse. Sadly, that was often the response of parents to their daughter or son’s unplanned pregnancy. The abuse may have been mixed up with discipline and mirroring, individuals being forced to do things for the sake of the family, for the sake of appearances. Such parental pressures, with specific threats to withdraw parental support, both direct and financial, not only influenced mothers to relinquish, but also was a major factor in birth fathers not taking up their responsibilities (Cole 2003, 34). Capitulation to the dominance of others, however, can have profound consequences on identity. Otherwise confident individuals crumble under the pressure, and for the rest of their lives feel disempowered and lacking rights.

But seemingly compliant bodies can also harbour anger and resentment and also become dominating bodies. The dominating body cannot accept the contingency of an adoption situation. This may be the fact of pregnancy or, later, the fact that there are biological relatives out there. An angry adoptee might find it hard to accept that under the cultural circumstances of the day their birth parents had no choice but to give them up for adoption, may feel angry at being ‘rejected’, or may never accept the contingency of their anomalous status. Wherever body-selves come up against limits and restrictions the dominating body displaces its rage against those limits on to others. Where that rage is not displaced there may be also be destructive self-abuse. Society does not want to hear this narrative of anger; it does not want to deal with prickly birth mothers, militant adoptive parents or angry adoptees. However, we might find helpful at this point a distinction which Evelyn Robinson (2003, 202) makes between anger, which can sometimes be appropriate and even helpful, and rage and bitterness which are not.

Communicative bodies and adoption

Communicative bodies are crucial in adoption, because the body itself is the message and the medium. Without the experience of a life together, the body itself, being in one another’s presence, is all that links birth parent and adoptee.  Frank tells us that the communicative body-self wants ‘to be a good story for others.’ This resonates well with reunion experiences, as we present ourselves to each other. Sometimes, an adopted person will delay search and reunion until they have achieved some life goal or status, or it may even be a goal weight! ‘I want my parents to know that I have done all right’. Sadly, we hear that some people will never embark on a reunion because they don’t feel that they are presentable enough. The communicative body, however,  is not the mirroring body; it does not need these external milestones, it seeks to be with others as they are.

Certainly, our reasons for searching can vary according to how our life story to that point has shaped our desires—our need to know more. It can be shaped by what we already know, or at least what we have been told. In a genuinely communicative encounter, we have to be open to what the other may present to us, the reality of the other, not just our fantasy. When I learned that my birth mother had relinquished nine children my sense of self was profoundly shaken. I had no words to deal with this? I had no story to fit this information in to. Was this comedy, commerce or tragedy? But, as Frank tells us, the communicative body is less concerned with words, than with alignment. What little I knew about adoption, and the birth mothers I knew, did not align with this picture. I had to re-examine how this information related to my reasons for searching and how it might affect my family and my birth mother’s family. I came to the conclusion, in June 1997, that the core value organising my personal search, and my academic explorations of ethics and adoption, would  be to be find out what it would mean to express care for this person. (Sadly, I never had the opportunity to find this out, as my birth mother died just over three months later. We never met.)

In the past, there was not much room for communicative bodies to express themselves at the time of an unplanned pregnancy. Gary Cole (2003, 27), a birth father, asks, ‘What could I have done differently?’ His answer:  ‘Just about everything, but, in particular, making all the decisions collaboratively with Kay [his girlfriend].’ He believes that if they had acted together they may have revisited the dominant influences of their parents and at the same time have been able to ‘demonstrate solidarity and serious intentions.’ Of course, such mature moral reflection is not always possible when one is young, and very little space was created in which such reflection could take place. Ironically, falling pregnant outside of marriage signalled you were not a responsible adult, and you became a child again, dominated by your parent’s wishes. 

One of the by-products of these cultural expectations at the time was that many grandparents also lost their grandchildren to adoption. They themselves lacked affirmative models (good stories) of family creation to redefine, or at least withstand, social expectations. How different these past experiences are from my own experience of becoming a grandparent to a child borne out wedlock, to at least one teenage parent. My son and his partner stood shoulder to shoulder (metaphorically) informing me and my wife and I, in no uncertain terms, that they had made their decision and there was nothing we could do about! Do about it! We couldn’t stop smiling from ear to ear. We could worry about the problems later. ‘Ethics seems to begin with a ... sense of ownership of situations; responsibility as an ethical person involves making a good story of the situation that self and other find themselves in and must come to own (Frank 1995, 50).

It is the communicative body-type, as an idealised type, which shoulders responsibility for reaching shared understandings of how care, honesty, accountability, integrity, justice and a host of other principles and virtues might apply to the here and now. It is the communicative body which gives testimony to how it has survived the past. It is the communicative body which does not disassociate itself from its experiences of loss, but listens to itself, feels its own pain, and makes room for grief. It is the communicative body which exhibits a productive desire through wanting more, not only for oneself, but for others.  

References

Arthur, L. 2002. Brainwashing and depersonalisation to comply with the rules within a Magdalene laundry. In Proceedings of the 1^st National Conference in the Mental Health Aspects of Persons Affected by Family Separation in Sydney October 2002,  by Origins NSW Inc. and Care Leavers of Australia Network, 1-9. Sydney: Origins NSW, Inc..

Cicchini, M. 1993. Development of responsibility: The experience of birth fathers in adoption. Adoption Research Counselling Service Inc., West Australia.

Cole, Gary. 2003. Ever after: Fathers and the impact of adoption. Christie’s Beach, SA: Clova Publications.

Frank, Arthur W. 1995. The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robinson, Evelyn Burns. 2003. Adoption and loss: The hidden grief. Rev. ed., Christie’s Beach, SA: Clova Publications.

Robinson, Evelyn Burns. 2004. Adoption and recovery: Solving the mystery of reunion. Christie’s Beach, SA: Clova Publications.

Verrier, Nancy. 1991. The primal wound: Understanding the adopted child. Baltimore: Gateway Press.

Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York: Routledge.

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