The framework that surrounds adoption laws, policies and practicees, the beliefs, myths and attitudes that endow it with enhanced and profound meaning, value, and mystery are what author Joanne Wolf Small, M.S.W. calls the adoption mystique. Its power is evident in the dispsaraging attitudes about adoption and adoptees held by millions of people.

Important issues remain buried, and most of the affected have kept silent. It is no wonder that we know so little about adoption and its aftermath. The Adoption Mystique outlines the history and background of American adoption culture from a psychosocial or environmental perspective. It looks at adoption through a series of essays that explore the hidden but powerful religious, social and economic factors that affect society's image of adoption past and present.The undercurrent of negative feelings and treatment accorded adoptive families--and adoptive status in particular--remain much the same despite recent reforms.

The book not only examines the problem, but leads to an effective solution.

Though Joanne Wolf Small, M.S.W. had lived adoption for three decades, she knew next to nothing about it as a social institution. After completing a search for her birth family, co-organizing Adoptees In Search, obtaining a Masters in clinical social work, and serving on a Federal adoption advisory panel she found a major discrepancy between child welfare's idiosyncratic representation of adoption, and the experiences of adopted persons, and birth and adoptive parents that live it. Her belief in the adoptive family as a positive alternate is dissonant with a widespread and covertly held negative public image.
Her professional experience includes a post-adoption clinical practice, clinical supervision, in-service training, and seminars, lectures, publications, and interviews with over a thousand adoptive family members.