Open adoption: educational reflections and pedagogical proposals on the recent jurisprudential interpretation of the Constitutional Court (judgment 183/2023) offering new perspectives on the protection of the child

Forty years after the approval of law no. 184 of 4 May 1983 "A child's right to a family" as later amended by law no. 149/2001, the very recent sentence no. 183 of 28 September 2023 no. 183 of the Constitutional Court, coherently with the previous judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, has endorsed the most popular interpretation according to which in certain specific cases the Juvenile Courts may, at the same time as issuing the legitimating full adoption judgment, provide that the adoptee shall maintain de facto (not juridical) relations with the original family (even if he/she has forfeited parental responsibility) while acquiring the full filiationis status of the adoptive family. This is the so-called open adoption or full open adoption, which, basing its provision on the institution of jurisprudential creation of the 'mild adoption', intends to add a family to the child without replacing it in those cases where breaking the existing significant emotional relationship would be contrary to the child's interest to break. These judicial decisions show the extent of the cultural and social change, that recognises the importance of a person's affective and family history and value the weight of the environment to which the child belongs. This jurisprudence has interpreted the progress and acquisitions resulting from interdisciplinary scientific fields such as psychology, sociology, pedagogy, ethology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis; these disciplines have highlighted how there are specific situations in which maintaining relations with the family of origin may represent an appropriate response to a series of critical issues that full adoption sometimes faces and that, on the contrary, prohibits the same relations (such as the so-called 'blameless abandonment' cases due to non-voluntary deficiencies or fragility). However, a more in-depth educational reflection cannot fail to point out how in the open form of adoption complex inter-subjective dynamics come into play and how that may awaken in all the parties involved (child, family of origin, adoptive family) silent traumas (sense of guilt, narcissistic wounds, bereavements not fully processed, etc.), creating ambivalent or conflictual situations that are detrimental instead of promoting the child's development. In fact, if it is true that the success of the adoption process - whatever its form - depends on the degree of stability and reliability of mutual affective recognition between child and adoptive parent, achieved at the end of a progressive and delicate process of building and consolidating ties, it is therefore urgent to reflect – from a pedagogic perspective - on the good practices to be implemented in the socio-educational systems involved in this process (pre- and post-adoption services, schools, etc.) to promote relations between natural and adoptive parents capable of hinging on the conscious and responsible acceptance of the different roles and functions within the open family environment. This is in order to avoid subjecting the child to what Winnicot called «impingement», i.e. negative pressure that causes a fracture in the sense of continuity of the self and instead guarantee a unified existential narrative.