The Japanese Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2003, Vol. 42, No. 2, 146-165
Discoursive Strategy for the Commitment to Adoption with Infants Who Had Been Reared at Residential Nurseries: A Discourse Analysis of a Seminar for Adoption RAKUGI AKIKO (Graduate School of Human & Environmental Studies, Kyoto University) The present study investigated a discursive strategy used by an organization that was established to promote the adoption of infants reared in residential nurseries. A seminar was developed to facilitate the adoption of infants less than 2 years old. In the seminar, couples unblessed with children but wanted to adopt infants were given information about the developmental processes of adopted children, especially troubles adoptive parents face after adoption. The seminar tried to decided couples to become adopted parents by telling these problems may shake couples' life by the root. Such processes made couples to clear their norms that they had depended on unconsciously, to deny their images of parent-child relationships. It is suggested that final decisions to become adopted parents have constructed something like the axiom for couple's future life after adoption. In other words, a discursive strategy functioned as an attempt to construct a transcendentality substitute for blood relationships. Key Words: infants who are reared at residential nurseries, adopted children and adopted parents, a seminar for adoption, a discursive strategy, transcendentality