El test Pata Negra y los conflictos de lealtad en la adopción

The condition of being an adopted child entails a parental duplicity –the biological and the adoptive parents– ceating a loyalty conflicts. The purpose of this work is to know the parental loyalty conflicts that suffer the adopted child and assess the potential impact caused in their emotional development, through Projectives Methods, the Corman’s Patte Noire Test (1961). Our study was conducted with 10 children of Nepal, as part of international adoption group in Spain. The results show that having two sets of parents unleashes multiple ambivalent and contradictory feelings (love/aggressiveness, desire/rejection, etc.) towards the biological and adoptive parents. This affective ambivalence is also reinforced by the experience of abandonment and rejection by the biological parents. This has been experienced as a punishment with a keen sense of guilt, hindering the child’s emotional development.