Barbara Steck – författare

This book addresses the psychosocial complexities of adoption from multiple perspectives, including the biological family, adopted child, and adoptive parents. It highlights the must-have sensitivity and tactfulness for recurring discussions of the adoption situation.

Organized into 10 parts, the book begins with a brief outline of the history of adoption and its legal status from antiquity to modern times. Chapters in the first half of the book examine critical topics such as different parenthood situations, stress and pain processes in early childhood, and challenges of domestic, international, transcultural, transracial, foster, and sexual and gender minorities adoption. Within the second half of the book, chapters describe the birth parents'' difficulties in relinquishing their infant, the motives of the adoptive parents, and the hardships of the adoptive children in self-development. The final chapters address the topic of deprivation, traumatization, and developmental trauma disorders on a psychodynamic level accompanied by clinical vignettes.

Recent advances in the understanding of brain functions are reviewed in this text, along with how neurobiological research and brain imaging contributes to identifying and treating neurologic and psychiatric disorders. Chapters focus on consciousness, memory, emotions, language, communication, trauma, pain and resilience, while exploring how stressful events impact mental health and interrupt the continuity of one''s sense of self. Clinical vignettes of patients with neurological and mental affections reveal coping and grieving processes in dreams and narratives. This presentation of clinical experience with neuro-scientific evidence provides neurologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychologists with a coherent picture of the brain-mind relationship.