Ghosting

Betty Jean Lifton, one of our most psychologically penetrating writers on adoption, believed in ghosts. Not “respectable” ghosts, perhaps, who are “unambiguously dead,” but the ghosts that haunt everyone in the so-called “adoption triad:”

These ghosts spring from the depths of the unresolved grief, loss, and trauma that everyone has experienced. They represent the lost babies, the parents who lost them, and the parents who found them. Too dangerous to be allowed into consciousness, they are consigned to a spectral place I call the Ghost Kingdom. Search and reunion is an attempt by adoptees to reconnect with the ghost mother and father, and live the alternate life.¹

When I first read Lifton’s writing on the Ghost Kingdom, I wanted to embrace the concept, but I was wary. In childhood and adolescence I did not wish for my biological parents’ return. I did not want—or permit myself to want—to know them. Being raised in a Catholic family that embraced petitionary prayer to Jesus, Mary, and the saints, I was not above praying for things I thought my heart yearned for. I prayed for a particular girl to like me, for example. (She never did.) I did not pray to make the Ghost Kingdom real.

So if the Ghost Kingdom were to rise past mere metaphor and have some kind of psychological reality for me, it would need to operate beneath conscious awareness, as Lifton postulated it did. And as I reflect on the changes I have seen in myself since rediscovering and reuniting with my birth mother, I’ve gradually opened myself to the possibility that there really are deep psychic forces that I can personify as the Ghostly versions of myself and my original parents.

One kind of evidence consists in what I now see as a radical shift—an incredibly swift “defogging” and hunger to assimilate new relationships into my identity—once I made contact with my birth mother’s family. It was as if my ontological status suddenly flipped: from (adopted) scion of the Corsentino family to (true) scion of her family. Without ever stating to myself that I was doing it, I retroactively populated my Ghost Kingdom with these people and then brought them out into the light. They were my people, no longer hidden from me. They answered a prayer I had never once said.

One way to think of this shift is that it was jarringly random: for no good reason I was now treating myself as a new person in a family of complete strangers. This, I think, is close to how my wife at the time perceived it. Between 2014 and 2019 I made almost quarterly visits to my birth relatives, in two states. I brought my children on these trips. I was so eager to assimilate that I drove one of my birth mother’s siblings away. My then-wife termed these people my “instant family.”

I had seen this happen before, and to a more extreme degree. During high school, one of my closest friends found himself welcoming into his home a half-brother who had been wholly absent from the family. That half-brother moved into his house and changed his name to an ancestral family name. I remember finding this strange. Now I see that he too was inhabiting, or becoming, his spectral self, and bringing it out of the Ghost Kingdom.

I don’t accept the idea that my change, post-discovery, was random. I see it as the product of forces I had, for the good of my soul, suppressed beneath consciousness. Experience, at last, had cast light on these ghostly relatives, and they burst into view.

Now that I can accept the reality of the Ghost Kingdom and its denizens, I can begin to reckon compassionately with an ugly fact about myself: I ghost people. I’ve done it all my life. I let people into my life and then I cast them out. I don’t formally evict anyone; I lose touch, move on, let go. My friend I mentioned above is one such person. We’ve spoken on the phone fairly recently, about three years ago. Our contact is sparse. Prior to that, we talked in 2007, when I was recovering from cancer. Prior to that, nothing since about 1996. My undergraduate academic mentor, who devoted almost all of his energy in the last years of his teaching career to preparing me for a life in the professoriate: I haven’t spoken with him since 1996. In 1999, when I was struggling badly with graduate school, he emailed me: “Let me know if I can help.” I’m not sure how he knew. I didn’t reply. A few years later, at the request of his department’s chair, I wrote a tribute to be read at his retirement ceremony. I don’t know if he’s still alive. I’m afraid to Google and find out.

Friends I made in graduate school, relatives I enjoyed being with in childhood and adolescence, people who lavished love and attention on me: I lose touch. Talking about this with my therapist, I got to rattling off names until she asked for a pause and said, “Don’t you think this is an adoptee’s defense mechanism?” For some, I think it can be. It is something like the inverse of my Ghost Kingdom. Call it the Realm of the Ghosted, who were fully real before their banishment.

Because, I believe, I was fully real to my birth mother before my banishment: my literal banishment, my expulsion from the family into which I was born. She had chosen a name for me, after all. Undoubtedly she was advised to “move on,” to detach my life from hers (or hers from mine). How was it decided that I had to be relinquished? What forces combined to compel that decision? Who wanted it to happen? Who issued the banishment decree? I can never know the full answer. But now I know more than I did as a child, which was only the bare fact that I was given away—rejected. That there was no room for me. That my adoptive mother loved me so deeply, clung so hard, made it all the harder to understand how my real mother could release me into the world, forever invisible and unknowable.

I have seen the “defense mechanism,” in my therapist’s words, described as “anticipatory rejection.” My life began with a primal rejection, maybe the most momentous rejection there can be: rejection by the very person who bore me into the world. If this can happen, then what is anyone to anyone else, really? Better to treat relationships as ultimately unreal. In the end, there is only me. People populate my life, but I belong to no one and no one belongs to me. I don’t know whether, by sending people into the Realm of the Ghosted, I am rejecting them, or repeatedly enacting my rejection of the idea of a “real” relationship. There is a kind of solipsism in this attitude. In the end, I am only at home with myself.

But when I think of how swiftly I acted when I discovered my biological family, I wonder if there isn’t another impulse within me, warring with the defense mechanism: an impulse to bring people out of the ghostly realms and welcome them back into living reality. My birth mother showed me that banishment need not be permanent. I think of how readily I accepted her account of why she consigned me to a fate she wasn’t permitted to know—an act that left many other women in her situation with a lifelong burden of guilt and shame. Maybe there is a lesson in this, because when I ask myself why I’ve left so many people in my life in the Realm of the Ghosted, the best answer I can give is: I’m ashamed.

The darker possibility is that my current relationships with my birth mother’s family are destined, like so many others before them, for banishment into the Realm of the Ghosted: that it is part of my identity, as an adoptee, to belong with no one, and that not even my birth mother’s unghosting can change that.

I don’t know, but I encouraged by the thought that ghosting need not be permanent—in one sense, at least. I am no longer purely a ghost to my birth mother, nor is she to me. In another sense, however, there will always remain the shadow realm of the lives we might have lived had we not been separated. I feel it whenever I look at photos of her taken in the years after she relinquished me and before our reunion. I feel it too whenever I look at photos of myself during those years. But this is a kind of realm we all create for ourselves, adopted or not, when we think about sundered relationships: ended friendships, divorce, death.

Knowing better the why of my original banishment, I see how my Ghost Kingdom, though powerful, is built out of constructions, projections. I can choose to unghost the people I care about, though it may not be easy work. Our ghosts are as real as we make them—and no more.

1. “Ghosts in the Adopted Family,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30:1 (2010), p. 71.