Adoption, a subject long cloaked in silence, is coming out of the closet. A veritable avalanche of books, magazine articles, and television programs debate the end of the "closed" system, which cut adoptees off from their heritage, and the beginning of an open system. While legal and ethical controversies continue to swirl around adoption, here is the first book to provide solid psychological grounding for the importance of openness in adoption from the perspective of an adopted person.

Betty Jean Lifton, herself an adoptee whose Lost and Found has become a bible to other adoptees and to those who would understand the adoption experience, explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child's lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.

Filled with moving life stories of adopted men and women, the book examines how separation from the birth mother and secrecy in the adoption system have affected adoptees' sense of identity as well as their attachment to their adoptive parents. Lifton introduces the concept of "cumulative adoption trauma" to help explain many troubling questions: Why do adopted people feel alienated? Why do they feel unreal, invisible to themselves and others? Why do they feel unborn?

Journey of the Adopted Self makes it poignantly clear that only by restoring connection to the past can adoptees move with dignity and hope into the future.