The Primal Wound: Book Review

             I just spent hours writing a Goodreads review for The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, and since I expect that only three or four people will read my magnum opus there, I have decided to also share my review here on my blog for anyone who is interested in the topics of adoption and pro-life issues.

 

My review:

I would like to slap two stars on this book and move on, but it is too problematic for me to leave it with a negative rating and no explanation. This book has lots of issues with its methodology and overall assumptions, and it includes the most disturbing take on abortion that I have ever encountered in my life.

The Good

According to this book’s thesis, children who are adopted at birth or during their first three years of their lives experience a “primal wound” from the disrupted bond with their biological mothers. Although many people assume that babies are not affected by adoption because they are too young to remember their biological mothers, science regarding prenatal bonding shows that mothers and babies establish deep connections to each other prior to the birth experience. The prenatal bond and hormonal changes that biological mothers experience prepare them for motherhood, and women become psychologically attuned to care for their particular baby.

Therapist Nancy Verrier explains that even though adoptive mothers can bond with their children and have wonderful relationships with them, it will not be the same, and it is dangerous for them to assume that the substitution will not impact the baby they have adopted. (In a later chapter, she also applies this concept to the issue of surrogacy, insisting that severing a child’s prenatal bond with a surrogate mother will create the same primal wound that adopted children experience, even if the child has the genetic material of both its parents.) Throughout this book, she validates adoptee’s common longings for and fantasies about birthmothers, saying that even though many therapists act as if these thoughts and desires are pathological, they are natural and inevitable.

Verrier is both a clinician and an adoptive mother, and this book addresses common identity issues, interpersonal struggles, and attachment problems that frequently arise within adoptive families. Much of this material rings true to what I know from loved one’s stories and other reading, but she has an especially helpful perspective on this because of her thesis that the primal wound impacts later problems. She explains that even though parents and therapists often believe that adoptees create these problems in their own minds, they were there for the transfer between mothers. Abandonment is not just a concept to them, but an experience. Even though an adoptee may have a wonderful connection with their adoptive family, the trauma of mother-loss is still hardwired into their psyche.

This author writes with sensitivity towards adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers, and she does not blame any of these parties for the problems that adoptive children frequently experience. She insists that the primal wound is always there, regardless of specific circumstances within the family, and that it is natural for adoptees to fear a second abandonment and to feel victimized or manipulated, even if they have loving parents. The only blame she casts is towards society in general, for ignoring the true consequences of relinquishment by telling birthmothers that they’ll get over it and telling adoptive parents that their child won’t have problems as long as they are loving enough.

She reiterates multiple times throughout the book that adoption is still the best alternative for children whose parents cannot care for them, but she insists that it is first and foremost a solution for children who need families, not for couples who want children. She says that couples need to work through their own grief and loss, accept adopted children as they are, and prepare themselves for the complications of being an adoptive family, instead of imposing their own dreams and desires on the child.

Verrier also provides suggestions for personal healing and development. Unlike many other psychologists, she does not enshrine therapy as the only or most important resource, and includes practical ideas for how adoptees and parents without the time, money, or inclination to engage in therapy can learn to manage difficult emotions and relationships. I especially appreciate her constant refrain that even though people cannot choose their feelings, they CAN choose their behavior. She also holds parents to a high standard for how they act, without blaming them for their child’s problems. 

The Bad

The author’s outdated Jungian psychology tends to undermine, not support, her otherwise science-based idea of the primal wound. Also, she provides no information about how she conducted her research, aside from mentioning conversations with her daughter, her patients, and adoptees who responded to an advertisement in the newspaper. She does not provide any numbers, statistics, or qualifying information about that study, and refers to “most adoptees” without grounding her findings in unbiased, scientific fact. I’m all for qualitative research, but it needs to be controlled enough to provide a representative look into a subject. In this case, she generalizes her findings about adoptees’ struggles and problematic family situations without differentiating people who have sought clinical help from the total population of adoptive families. 

             Some people who have experienced adoption may not relate to this woman’s findings, and it would be frustrating for them to read this and get the message that if they don’t agree with her, then they must be in denial. Adoption is a very complex topic, but this book treats the subject in a monolithic way, painting with a broad brush based on selected anecdotes and quotes from specific adoptees.

This book also focuses too much on children who are adopted just shortly after birth. Even though Verrier includes a chapter on the dynamics of adopting older children and abuse victims, she never makes it clear if these children are spared the primal wound of postnatal abandonment despite the trauma of later separation. I appreciate her effort to include dynamics related to older adoptees, but she fails to meaningfully differentiate the psychological implications of adoption for older children.

Another problem with this book is Verrier’s assumption that reunion with a birthmother is always necessary or desirable. She paints an honest picture of the emotional and psychological complications of reunion, but she over-hypes it as a transformative experience without acknowledging that it may be unwise in some cases. Also, she provides no guidance for people whose birthmothers are unavailable or deceased, and equates birthmothers to single mothers without ever mentioning couples or families who relinquish children. She also fails to acknowledge the profound complications for international adoptees who cannot connect with their birth families or even speak their language.

And it All Comes Crashing Down

The final issue that I have with this book, and the reason why I am putting it in a box of trade-ins, is its disturbing view of abortion. I knew from reading Goodreads reviews that this book accepted this issue as a paradox and did not communicate a strong view for or against it, but I was completely unprepared for what this would look like in practice. The author acknowledges that abortion kills a living human being who is biologically distinct from its mother, is simply at an early stage of development, and can feel pain, but she still thinks that ending this life is a matter of personal choice. This is wildly inconsistent with everything else that she has written throughout the whole book.

This entire book is about caring for children, protecting them, being sensitive to their needs, and bringing justice to them even at personal cost. In fact, she even urges mothers to stay home with their children for the first three years, saying that even though this comes at tremendous cost for career-driven women, it is essential to developing a secure attachment and not creating a primal wound through a less dramatic form of abandonment. She insists that people have such a great responsibility to their biological or adopted children that they should always sacrifice for the child’s greater good, but as long as that child is still located in utero, she thinks that murdering it is just a matter of personal choice. How does this make sense?

I expected her to downplay the baby’s humanity, make a personhood argument, or focus on female empowerment, but no, she doesn’t even attempt to dodge or justify the issue. We’re supposed to just accept “paradox.” Well, then! Why don’t we accept the paradox of mothers abusing their babies? Or, why couldn’t an overwhelmed mother of a toddler kill it? After all, just like the fetus, a toddler is also a human being who is alive, biologically distinct, and in an early stage of development. If none of those attributes are enough to protect the fetus, then why does the toddler have human rights?

She criticizes pro-choice people for making it sound like abortion is just a routine operation like appendix removal, and she criticizes pro-life people for hyping up adoption without a real sense of the emotional distress it can cause. These are both valid criticisms, but she somehow thinks that it is better for a child to be killed than for it to experience emotional distress.

However, she doesn’t really think this. In a later paragraph, she notes that when adoptees are reunited with their birthmothers, they often ask if she considered aborting them and always want the answer to be no. She never uses the terminology of survivor’s guilt, but writes that almost every adoptee who has spoken to her has expressed gratitude that their mothers did not get an abortion. She concludes, “They may have problems, but they have life.”

This section is full of extreme ideological whiplash. In one paragraph, she says that the issue of abortion has no right answer, but she opens the next paragraph by saying, “The belief that the being within the pregnant woman is, indeed, human life from the moment of conception has less to do with religion than with logic. What can the organism be if it is not a human being in its earliest stage of development?” She goes on to explain that the “zygote/fetus is a separate entity which is attached to the woman’s body, but is not part of her body.” Then, in a total non sequitur, she concludes that this means that women should make an informed choice by recognizing the impact of their decisions.

Okay. Got it. Should a woman kill her toddler after recognizing the impact of her decision? Is it okay for someone to recognize the impact of their decision and then abandon their child on the side of the road? This logic does not generalize to any other situation that a parent could face. Doing something that is morally wrong does not become acceptable just because you took the decision seriously and thought about the affect it would have.

While this author happily embraces paradox because it’s convenient and won’t garner major criticism, I am just dumbfounded. She made no attempt to provide any ethical or even emotional justification for abortion. She just thinks that we should accept it because it’s socially normal, and because carrying a child to term and parenting or relinquishing is a challenging experience. But, you know, raising a child is always difficult, and if you’re not allowed to end a baby’s, child’s, or teenager’s life later down the line, then why is it okay to kill them while they are in the womb? She provides no justification whatsoever for why this is different. She even talks about fetal pain sensitivity this without backing down from her irrational love of paradox, saying that “the least we can do is to anesthetize those involved in the abortion process and recognize the fetus as a human being whose feelings need to be honored.”

How can she be so illogical? We’ll deny you your basic human rights, but we’ll honor your “feelings” as we kill you. Aren’t you glad to have briefly existed in such an enlightened society?

Honestly, this view is even more disturbing to me than Peter Singer’s. He argues that because developing children lack higher cognitive development, it is just as ethically permissible to kill an infant or toddler as it is to abort a fetus. This is abhorrent, but at least he can argue his position and remain logically consistent. Nancy Verrier over here thinks that children of all ages are deserving of the greatest sacrifice and protection, unless they’re in the womb, in which case they are completely disposable.

For the most part, this book was a mixed bag, but this was the point where I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll be getting rid of this and will feel nauseated every time I think about it from here on out.” I have listened to so many pro-choice arguments, ranging from the inane to the deeply philosophical, but this is not even an argument. This is just the radical embrace of cognitive dissonance for the sake of comfort and convenience, and it goes against every value that the author had espoused up to this point. Her whole thesis is that babies have deep, active prenatal bonds with their mothers, are aware of their experiences, and are devastated when their mothers pass them off to strangers, but even though she treats this topic with the utmost seriousness, she thinks that it’s okay to dismember unborn babies and throw them out with the trash.

At the end of the chapter, she says that we have to acknowledge “painful truths.” She writes, “It is easier to believe that fetuses are not really human beings than to go through the conscious choice of ending a life,” but under what other circumstances is it okay to consciously end the life of another human being? Where is the ethical justification for this? What differentiates the freedom to destroy your fetus over the legal, social, and moral necessity to love, protect, and provide for your toddler?

Now, let me quote the final words of this book: “I’ve always wished that Moses had remained on Mt. Sinai a little longer and that God had given him an eleventh commandment: honor thy children. Oh, what a different world it might be…”

WELL, then! I was going to argue this based on logic alone, but since she brought up biblical ethics, I’ll point out that the sixth commandment is “do not murder.” Why long for an eleventh commandment if you’re not even ready to keep that one?

I agree that women need access to a full range of counseling services when they are faced with crisis pregnancies, and I understand why many people are pro-choice and why many women choose abortion, but even though it is important for people to be gracious, provide support, and treat women with dignity no matter what they choose, the idea that someone should acknowledge that abortion kills a human being and then choose it anyway is abhorrent. This author’s focus on children’s well-being completely collapses in a single chapter, because in her unwillingness to acknowledge that unborn human babies should have human rights, she isn’t honoring an existing paradox. Instead, she is embracing the kind of moral relativism, wild irrationality, and irresponsible and destructive impulse that she would denounce in any other parenting context or stage of a child’s life.