In his paper "Family Romances", Freud penned a particular stage he observed in young children the FAMILY ROMANCE FANTASY. In the latency period, children devise a common scenario; they imagine that their family had adopted them and that their 'real' family is waiting for them elsewhere. As children start to separate from their parents, they become anxious over their conflicting feelings of love and hate. They resolve this by constructing a separate set of parents with more NOBLE characteristics. Freud points out that generally speaking, these parents are

The popularity of adoption themes in myth, literature and fairy tales allow us to reclaim early, idealized images of our parents when we do not want to face the everyday reality of the parents we have. 2 Whereas a child who lives with her/his biological parents can escape in fantasy, eventually s/he is forced to live with the fact that the parents that s/he loves and the parents that s/he hates are the one and the same. This encourages the amalgamation of warring feeling in relationships. 3

However, the adopted child does have two sets of parents, even though one of them may be unknown. The adoptee may project their negative feelings onto the birth parents and positive feelings onto the adoptive or designate one set as the 'bad' parents and the other as the 'good' parents. Two sets of parents makes it easier to re-direct unpleasant feelings but it avoids the difficult task of learning to live with people toward whom one feels ambivalent at times. 4

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