My blood does not define me, my home does not define me, I am my own home:

Sense and Meanings of Being Adopted in the Light of Existential-Phenomenology

Abstract

Adoption brings as one of the concepts in the current world as a legal process where one chooses to accept and spontaneously receive someone else's child as one's own child. It means to say that adoption goes beyond biological aspects. This study aims to understand the pluridimensionality of the existence of the being-adopted from the adoption communication. Three people were interviewed who, submitted to the parameters of the phenomenological method and analyzed in the light of Martin Heidegger's Phenomenology, originated 6 thematic categories: a) Adoption as facticity; b) The taboo of talking about adoption; c) The curiosity of looking like someone, the guilt and fear of feeling; d) Accreditation of the meaning of one's own existence; e) The meaning of understanding adoption as a life experience; f) Proposing a specific perspective in psychotherapeutic care for adopted people. It is concluded that aspects must be observed and understood by the psychologist, in order to make his professional practice a place of listening, welcoming and possible care for the client, and in this way, issues such as identity, freedom, meaning and sense need to be considered by the existential-phenomenological psychotherapist.