When we fear our children (biological, adopted or psychological)

With the film Orphan opening today, some factions have raised an uproar about an adoption horror story threatening to scare potential parents away from adopting (http://tiny.cc/lecl8).  I don’t think this is going to happen any more than Fatal Attraction managed to put the kibosh on married men seducing women (disturbed or otherwise) and later wishing they hadn’t done that.

But like Fatal Attraction a film like Orphan taps into unconscious fears; the former is all about the Shadow Anima, the dark aspect of the feminine that gets projected out, and then is both desired and feared—an archetypal story that threads its way through Ulysses tempted by the sirens and re-appears as the femme fatale in many a detective yarn.  

When it comes to the archetype of the child, we have Peter Pan on the one hand, and then we have the demon child on the other.  What’s essential to understand as parents is that the demon child dwells within us, and cannot be avoided either via birth-control nor by battening the hatches on adoption and hanging garlic on the door.