An Introduction to Ghost Kingdom Narratives
What are Ghost Kingdoms?
In the fifth season of This is Us, a popular NBC drama, Randall explains to his brother, Kevin, what a Ghost Kingdom is according to Randall’s transracial adoptee support group. Randall describes a Ghost Kingdom as “like an alternate reality in your mind where you imagine the life you would have had if you were never adopted” (This Is Us). In his Ghost Kingdom, he imagined that the friendly librarian who let him check out extra books and the meteorologist on television, the only two Black adults he saw regularly who looked like him, were his biological parents. He goes on to explain that as a child he felt guilty about the daydreams he had in his Ghost Kingdom, which is why he never spoke about them.
Shedding light on this kind of inner adoptee narrative the way This Is Us does is not only a rare moment in which such a complex adoption issue is accurately brought to light; it is also important to the adoptee community because it helps validate those with similar experiences to Randall’s. Adoptees like Randall often endure a critical lack of knowledge about themselves and their biological history. Ghost Kingdom narratives bring to light the creative ways in which adoptees often build their realities by implementing fiction in place of unknown facts. Because of the ways in which they rhetorically employ fictional strategies in the construction of their life narratives, these narratives are worth investigating as a unique combination of both life-writing and fictional writing. Additionally, other narratives concerning critical gaps of knowledge about the self, like those adoptees experience, might benefit from an investigation of this narrative model.
While the explanation of Ghost Kingdoms in This Is Us is, as the writer Jon Dorsey said in an interview, “melt[ed] … down to the most basic kind of concept,” Randall’s explanation is the primary definition of Ghost Kingdoms that most commonly reaches the general public (Hunt). However, the full and more nuanced explanation of what a Ghost Kingdom is in adoptee psychologist and activist Betty Jean Lifton’s third book, Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness, which narrates the internal adoptee experience. Primarily, a Ghost Kingdom is an internal psychic construction that all members of the adoption circle, the birthparents, extended birth family, adoptive parents, extended adoptive family, siblings, and the adoptee, may create consciously or unconsciously. This internal realm often includes characters who may or may not exist in real life, but are represented in a fictionalized manner so that each family member might have a private space in which to fantasize about the possibilities of a life not lived.
For the purpose of my project, I will focus on case studies which either engage with or can be interpreted with Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory from an adoptee’s perspective. I do so because I myself am an adoptee and feel confident that I can speak on such a subject with authority, given my own lived experience. Additionally, I feel that adoptee-written narratives specifically give their audiences a unique perspective on the importance of exploration of the actual self via the act of fiction-making.
Though I will focus exclusively on the adoptee’s perspective of this phenomena, internal fiction-making does span across the triad, affecting each family member, especially the birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptee, differently. Lifton explains in her book that
The adopted child is always accompanied by the ghost of the child he might have been had he stayed with his birth mother and by the ghost of the fantasy child his adoptive parents might have had. He is also accompanied by the ghost of the birth mother, from whom he has never completely disconnected, and the ghost of the birth father, hidden behind her. The adoptive mother and father are accompanied by the ghost of the perfect biological child they might have had, who walks beside the adopted child who is taking its place. The birth mother (and father, to a lesser extent) is accompanied by a retinue of ghosts. The ghost of the baby she gave up. The ghost of her lost lover, whom she connects with the baby. The ghost of the mother she might have been. And the ghosts of the baby’s adoptive parents. (11)
I leave Lifton’s explanation intact here because she explains the many different possibilities for ghosts from each different perspective of the adoptive family in a concise way. These collective ghosts, Lifton contends, are part of the internal fantasy world she refers to as a Ghost Kingdom. But the ghost characters that exist here are not the entire psychic scenario she lays out in her book. Many adoptees, she claims, retreat into this Ghost Kingdom to play out fantasies about what could have happened if the life events for all involved had happened differently or to test scenarios that might play out in the future. Would the adoptive parents have adopted a child if they had no fertility issues? Would the biological parents have kept a child if they had more financial support? Would the child exist at all if abortion had been accessible? How might a birth parent react upon a surprise reunion? There are endless possible worlds that might exist internally when an adoptee explores these counterfactuals.
Lifton also states that adoptees have the choice of leaving one’s internal world and facing the ghosts by “crossing over” (142). According to Lifton, “Crossing over means building a bridge between the material world one has lived in and the shadowy Ghost Kingdom one has fantasized about” (142). In other words, adoptees cross over when they seek out reunion or go searching for their biological relatives. When they do so, they build a bridge between the fantasies they have had of these relatives and the actual people they may find. The fantasies and the ghosts that haunt adoptees during periods of unknowing hold the potential to turn into actual people later on (like, for instance, if the adoptive parents are suddenly able to reproduce or if biological relatives are found via reunion); but the opposite can also be true, that these ghosts may never manifest in what we call reality or the actual world.
To clarify, Ghost Kingdoms are not situations where people are being literally haunted by actual ghosts. Instead, the language used in this theory is highly metaphorical. The use of the metaphor allows people to expand their imaginations to understand previously unknown experiences. In this case, people outside of the adoption circle may not automatically be able to imagine what the experience must be like to have such significant gaps in the knowledge one has about oneself, but when members of the adoption circle use the metaphorical language of ghosts as they do in these narratives, their audiences may have a better understanding of the experience. The idea of ghosts in fiction is one so common that it has essentially been naturalized as a metaphor. When a reader encounters a ghost in a narrative, they come armed with a schema or a general idea of ghost functions and possible metaphorical meanings. According to Shuying An, schema theory “is an explanation of how readers use prior knowledge to comprehend and learn from text” (130). Because of readers’ previous interactions interpreting texts with ghosts and thereby a collective schema concerning ghosts, readers already possess an advantageous pre-built conception that aids them in successfully interpreting the narrative.
Ghost Kingdoms or internal fantasies which arise from a lack of information materialize in narrative in a myriad of different ways which I will explore in three separate case studies of adoptee-written narratives that integrate Ghost Kingdom themes. Whether a person consciously visits their fantasies, only wonders about their circumstances fleetingly, or simply lets the emotions lie repressed, Ghost Kingdom fantasies seem to be a fundamental piece of cognition that aid a person in establishing a sense of self and putting their life into a narrative order. Amid so many unknowns in their own lives, adoptees are drawn to create stories and worlds that not only affect their identities but also help create their narrative identities, a concept defined by Dan McAdams as “the internalized, evolving story of the self that each person crafts to provide his or her life with a sense of purpose and unity” (233). These daydreams are especially prevalent to adoptees whose adoptions are laced with secrecy, deception, and shame or, in other words, situations that allow a significant gap of knowledge about the self to exist.
The History of Ghost Kingdoms
Although Lifton developed the Ghost Kingdom theory in 1994, she was actually writing toward this idea in her earlier publications. In her memoir, Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (1975) and another book on adoption in 1979, Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience, she detailed her reunion experience and explored the experiences of all three primary members of the triad, adoptees, birthparents, and adoptive parents. In these two books, there are clues as to how she began building her theory of Ghost Kingdoms based on not only her experience as an adoptee, but also the fragments of myth and science she thought were relevant to the psychological experience of adoption. Among the most important of these clues are her references to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey; a term coined by a Finnish psychiatrist, “hereditary ghost;” a mesmerizing chapter by a naturalist, Loren Eiseley, which interrogates man’s need for exploration of both the world beyond him and himself; and Freud’s family romance.
In 1949, Joseph Campbell, a mythology professor at Sarah Lawrence College, published his book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where he introduced the concept of the hero’s journey (also called the monomyth), which is a story template that generally follows a hero who is called to go on an adventure, overcomes obstacles, then returns home changed. His theory became wildly popular and was famously the basis of the plotline for the Star Wars franchise built by George Lucas.
Part of the allure of the hero’s journey was that it claimed to be a universal explanation for myths told by humans across the world, a metaphor for humankind’s inner journey, and a metaphorical map of sorts that could help guide storytellers appeal to a wide variety of audiences. Frequently cited throughout all three of Lifton’s books, the hero’s journey largely sets the stage for Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory in the three major phases of Ghost Kingdoms: the development of ghosts in periods of stasis, the movement towards seeking out truth often through search and reunion, and the reconciliation between the ghosts and whatever reality is found. Much like the hero's journey, the Ghost Kingdom sets out an unavoidable quest for adoptees if they want to find meaning in their lives. She claims they must accept the call for adventure and dive into the dark abyss of their unknown hereditary past.
Lifton was not the first to use the metaphor of ghosts in relation to either the adoptee’s internal struggle or mankind’s more general search for knowledge. In 1964, both Max Frisk and Loren Eiseley wrote about ghosts. Frisk, a Finnish psychiatrist, wrote an article about the behavior of adopted adolescents, and in it, he used the term “hereditary ghost” to describe the lack of a “genetic ego” in adopted children (Frisk 9). He claimed that adopted children had no “genetic concept of self” which, he suggested, made identity development elusive and difficult (10). He explained that “In order to rid themselves of this ghost, a great need arose for seeing their real parents, to discover what their true character was” (10). This recommendation for adoptees to seek out reunion would be repeated in Lifton’s theory of Ghost Kingdoms. In both Frisk’s article and Lifton’s later work, the explanation of genetic ghosts led to the question of whether those ghosts could be laid to rest. The term “hereditary ghost” struck a chord with Lifton, and she used it to expand on H. J. Sants’ conclusion that “adopted children have … the burden of adoption stress,” and something called “genealogical bewilderment” which is when “one … has no knowledge of his natural parents or only uncertain knowledge of them” (Lifton, Lost & Found 48-49). For Lifton, a woman deeply interested in myths (she published several children’s books over her lifetime), the metaphor of a ghost seemed the most understandable symbol for the kind of confusion adopted children face when establishing their identities with no genetic history to aid them. Like the story of the ugly duckling, she suggested that hereditary ghosts cannot be put to rest until they are discovered and integrated into the self in reality.
Loren Eiseley’s contribution to Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory can be found in his book The Unexpected Universe, which includes a chapter called “The Ghost Continent.” In it, he likens the mysterious and unexplored Antarctica of the 1800s to the existential crisis that many people experience when they are seeking meaning in their lives which is often attempted through discovery but, as he argues, we would do better by consulting the lessons of the past. By comparing Captain James Cook’s expedition of Antarctica and the journey into space going on at the time of his writing (in 1964) to Odysseus' famous ten year journey home in The Odyssey, he lays out the case that man’s simultaneous searches for knowledge and tranquility are at odds with one another because, as we explore and discover cartography previously labeled terra incognita, we face inwardly our own desolation. In his opening line he says, “Every man contains within himself a ghost continent” (Eiseley 3). It is this quote that Lifton references in Lost & Found, as she explains that “everyone but the adopted has caught a glimpse, however fleeting, of his own ghosts” (5). Though Eiseley’s chapter is at once a history of exploration and a commentary on the journeys that humans embark on in the world and within themselves, Lifton interprets his poetic musing, especially his interpretations of Odysseus, as the painting of a larger picture, one that depicts the basic human drive propelling us to seek out meaning, and for adoptees especially, that journey is exactly as Eiseley portrays it: “Knowledge without sympathetic perception is barren” (13). That is to say, adoptees already face an insurmountable lack of knowledge about themselves, but even if they pursue their history or seek reunion, it is a solitary journey that is widely misunderstood except by their fellow adoptee peers. So, building on the idea that adoptees must confront those “strange shapes amidst [our] interior ice floes,” Lifton began the construction of that inner world that adoptees (and others in the adoption constellation) might build as they prepare for their own journeys toward knowing themselves (3). Her theory would not be a ghost continent, though; it would be a Ghost Kingdom.
Thus far, I’ve established the history of the term “ghost” and how it derives from Frisk and Eiseley’s use of it in their work which Lifton integrated into her theory, a psychic reality largely built on the foundation of Campbell’s monomyth. However, the term "kingdom" has a much more elusive history. Though there are many anecdotal records of adoptees who say they often daydreamed as children that they might secretly be royalty, there is only one other deduction I can make about Lifton’s terminology here, which is that she adapted the idea of a kingdom from Freud’s famous notion of the family romance. In brief, Freud’s theory of the family romance contends that children may fantasize that they are not their parents’ children, but actually have parents elsewhere, often idealized, of better social standing or even royal blood (Freud 239). But as Lifton explains in Lost & Found: The Adoption Experience, “there really are two other parents out there” for adoptees so while this may be a fantasy for kept children (kept children are children who grow up with their biological family), it is not a purely fictional fantasy for adoptees because the possibility of a discovery like this is completely possible in reality for the adoptee (28).
Though I think that the use of the word kingdom invites connotations of the afterlife (Kingdom Come) or of false fantasies reeking of Happily Ever After, Lifton has coined her theory with this word and the adoption community has accepted it as such. As to why the adoption community has accepted this theory at face value largely has to do with the underlying cause for the creation of such an internal world.
The Why of Ghost Kingdoms
In the 1970s, when Lifton and others forayed into the unknown territory of speaking out about adoption, adoptions were still largely secret and shameful affairs. Records were sealed upon the adoption of an infant or child (and in most states, still are), unavailable even to adult adoptees unless they had a court order proving “reasonable cause." In other words, it depended on the judge’s mood that day. While not so direct as stamping a birth certificate with the term “illegitimate” as was the case before the 1940s, the hush-hush nature of begetting a bastard out of wedlock and the negative ramifications for both the mother and the child in such an event continued to haunt the adoptive family.
The social history of the climate of adoptions is imperative to understand, especially because when Lifton was active, most adoptions were closed and records were unavailable to adult adoptees, and therefore, shame and secrecy within families, biological and adoptive, thrived. In part, Lifton’s theory on Ghost Kingdoms reflects this culture of shame and secrecy because in such a family atmosphere of sealed lips and lies, it makes perfect sense that an adoptee would retreat inside themselves to consider the questions they know they could not ask their adoptive parents. In an internal fantasy, they could be free to imagine their other possible lives and relatives in safety.
The creation of fictional inner-narratives—what Lifton calls the Ghost Kingdom—and the textual evidence of these narratives I will engage with, is due in large part to gaps in memory, pre-verbal trauma caused by maternal separation, and secrecy about events prior to memory formation. In an article about Holocaust decendants and concepts of memory, Marianne Hirsch coined the term “post-memory” which she defined as the handed down traumatic memories that children of survivors inherit. Adoptee children do not receive specific or accurate traumatic memories via storytelling, but as Nancy Verrier argued in her 1993 book, The Primal Wound, when babies are separated from their mothers, “a wound which is physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual” occurs (xvi). In addition to this traumatic wound (and the obvious biological ramifications of separation at birth), I argue that the absence of post-memory or the sudden discovery of it can also be debilitating.
Furthermore, because of the trauma of the separation of mother and child, adoptees experience what Pauline Boss and Donna Carnes call “ambiguous loss,” which they define as “a unique kind of loss when a loved one disappears in body or mind” (456). Boss and Carnes say that “mystery persists with ambiguous loss, sometimes forever—and even across generations,” but that “rather than closure, the goal is a search for meaning” (457). Adoptees, specifically those adopted during infancy or early childhood, know what ambiguous loss is. They grow up hearing things like, “you’re so lucky,” when in reality, they have lost ties with their physical mother and emotional bonds with biological relatives who are very much alive, but lost as if dead to the adoptee. Because of the dominant meta -narratives surrounding adoption, mostly told by adoption agencies and adoptive parents, adoptees do not often have the space to even grieve their losses without being shamed for acting ungratefully.
The pain of their loss becomes a buried and misunderstood trauma, especially in situations where the adoptee overwhelmingly hears the perceived positives of their adoption but is given no space or words for the negatives. As Cathy Caruth says, “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” ( 5). What this means for adoptees is that with the loss of their biological ties, their birth stories, and more, their personal histories become impossible to understand. Because adoptees carry a truly devastating trauma, to be separated from their biological and social history and implanted into a new one, their histories are complicated and fragile. David Kessler has said that everyone has “a need for their grief to be witnessed” and by writing their stories, even fictionalized versions of them, adoptees are allowing audiences outside of themselves to witness various versions of grief from their adoption. That is where Ghost Kingdom fantasies and possible worlds may help alleviate some of the denial of adoptees’ right to grieve. The narratives that result from the memory gaps they grow up with beg to be filled, even if they are fictitious. By filling in these memory gaps with fantasies of what could have been, based on any small amount of information about their adoption that they have, adoptees can begin to build the foundations of their identity.
Unfortunately, adoptees’ identities are often unsteady given the ambiguity of the information given freely from adoptive parents or even the government. To fill this informational gap, they create narratives that are fictional, yet as to how they relate to the adoptee’s identity, they are real. Building identity is complicated and the process of building identity depends largely on the stories adoptees are told about themselves which turn into the stories they tell about themselves as they learn what their relationships will be with the world. As Jerome Bruner says, “It is far more important, for appreciating the human condition, to understand the ways human beings construct their worlds” (46). The very fact that people create possible worlds as part of their inner lives speaks to the ways in which they are everyday building themselves and their realities from the story pieces around them that they prefer, much as birds build their nests out of the materials they deem the sturdiest, the prettiest, or the softest. All humans are constantly building their inner worlds and our identities, but as Erik Erikson explained, his initial study of identity crises in individuals found, beneath the surface, a tangled mess of traumatic historical events and the emigrations that followed them (43-47). When Erikson was beginning to formulate his theories on identity in the 1930s and 40s, families were migrating to America, leaving one national identity behind in order to form a new one, yet there was still need to hold onto the old identity (44). In other words, identity had a social aspect. Instead of understanding his patients’ “originological” issues (an idea that rested on finding “where it all started”), he said “The question was also what world image they were sharing, where they were going from where they were, and who was going with them” (44). In this way, he mapped out a new framework that said identity must be built upon the histories of a person’s cultural background and those who might travel to new places (and therefore create new identities) with them.
And if identity is built upon histories that adoptees know little of and the migrations to new families they make before memory has developed, it should be no surprise that their identities are forming in unusual ways. If they have little information about those histories, those lost families, they simply retreat inside themselves and build one from their imagination. Unlike the narrative identities built by people who have the memories to reconstruct the histories that came before them, adoptees are often given little to no information of their biological past (McAdams, 233). Ghost Kingdoms are created by adoptees to fill these gaps, to salve these wounds, to attempt to build an identity in a place where there’s more mystery than fact.
How Ghost Kingdoms Narratives Work
The conception of Ghost Kingdoms and the inner narratives that go along with them highlight several narrative intricacies that open up a whole new realm of discussion for literary, rhetoric, and narrative scholars. For instance, the ghosts help the audience visualize how one might craft narratives with metaphors to apply to life stories. The written or performed narratives are the perfect example of how fictive discourse enables writers to communicate and engage rhetorically. And Ghost Kingdom narratives, in general, ask the audience to ponder how they think about the actual world they inhabit versus the possible worlds they imagine and create, whether those worlds are close to reality as we understand it or fantastical so that the creator might have someplace warm to escape to.
Discussions of the narrative implications of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom do not fully exist yet. Because Lifton framed her theory as a psychological phenomenon, it has been received as such which means that academia at large has not interacted with the concept. As for therapeutic practice, there are a few scattered therapeutic studies available, but none explore the theoretical implications in depth. Yet the Ghost Kingdom still haunts adoptee culture to the point that, named or not, it is present in adoptee narratives of all kinds, blurring the line between fiction and reality. The metaphorical map Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom provided the adoptee community with continues to influence adoptees as they begin deconstructing and reconstructing the narratives of their lives. In fact, the Ghost Kingdom is relevant to the adoption conversation as recently as this past year. At the 2021 Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) Conference, two artists shared their work, both exclusively dealing with Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom. These two pieces and a novel by Matthew Salesses are my three case studies, but instead of interpreting these adoptee-written works through a psychological frame, I aim to discuss their narrative components.
Studying adoption narratives with the tools of narrative theories is not a new interdisciplinary focus, but it is a small one. One of the most relevant scholars to this intersection of study is Margaret Homans who deconstructs several adoption narratives using narrative and trauma theory in her article, “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins,” where she argues that “adoption is a fiction-generating machine” because “it presents in a particularly acute form the problem of the unknowability of origins and the common tendency to address that problem with fiction making” (5). She goes on to investigate adoption narratives as like or as trauma narratives that “are often obsessively oriented towards an irretrievable past” and therefore “compel[ed to] the creation of plausible if not verifiable narratives” (7). Because adoptees have so many unknowns in their biological pasts and physical origins, there is no other logical way to fill in that gap of self besides fiction-making, which is how fantasies like Ghost Kingdoms take form. Homans claims that “the adoptive compulsion to search for origins becomes a compulsion to create them” (13). That compulsion to create narratives is a deeply human act, especially in terms of origin stories; think of all the origin tales of mankind’s ancestors, no matter the culture, that seek to explain the beginning of the world. As adoptees compose the stories of their lives and build the foundations of self, they must account for, in some way, what has happened to bring them to the present moment and then, perhaps, look to the future. Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory accounts for this trek through time because she describes the Ghost Kingdom as a psychic realm, but also describes the act of crossing over as a journey through time. Lifton’s conception of the Ghost Kingdom is not only a psychological theory, but a story outline which itself is made up with metaphorical language.
One of the primary functions of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory is to illustrate the emotional experience of being an adoptee with the use of metaphor. Though the ghosts that Lifton claims haunt an adoptee are not literal ghosts, the metaphor of a ghost to describe the ambiguous loss of family and history aids the audience in making a connection between what they know about being haunted and the idea Lifton introduces, being haunted by ambiguous loss. The metaphor of ghosts representing the loss of ambiguous characters significant to one’s life is a unique perspective because while the creation of these fantasy characters and worlds are a clear definition of fiction, they also directly affect the lived realities of the adoptee. Lifton doesn’t stop at the metaphor of ghosts. The Ghost Kingdom theory is also an allegory. The journey from unknowing to “crossing over” via reunion to confront the ghosts created in the wake of memory gaps is an entire story outline strongly reminiscent of Campbell’s hero’s journey. This story framework is constructed loosely enough that it’s beneficial as a structure for those in the adoption circle to use as an outline for the telling of their own stories. By giving shape to the ghosts that haunt adopted families through metaphor and allegory, specifically by saying that these Ghost Kingdoms arise from secrecy, Lifton seems to argue with her theory that if more openness was encouraged in adoption, Ghost Kingdoms would be less likely to turn pathological. Notably, Lifton was, during the 1970s and onwards, an advocate for adoption reform, specifically for open adoptions so this rhetorical strategy makes sense in her theory.
Using fiction to make an argument about the actual world is a rhetorical strategy that allows for social commentary to be made on a topic with hypothetical scenarios. The fictionality of Ghost Kingdom narratives is worth investigating because without their origins, adoptees, according to Homans, say they are seeking out the truth, but they may as well be creating new, more relevant fictions to build their identity upon (Homans). But although Homans claims that the fictions adoptees build “trade places” and “become competing realities” with previously unknown stories, she does not address how the fictions themselves function beyond filling a traumatic gap (11). I agree with her assessment thus far. However, Richard Walsh says that fictionality “functions within a communicative framework: it resides in a way of using a language, and its distinctiveness consists in the recognizably distinct rhetorical set invoked by that use” (Walsh 15). What he means is that by creating fiction, writers are communicating rhetorically so we should be asking what Ghost Kingdom narratives are communicating and what rhetorical strategies they use to do so. In the case of Lifton’s theory, which is in itself a narrative, an argument for open adoption is prominent, and the way she emphasizes this argument is by highlighting the ghosts that serve to replace a gap of knowledge which could be lessened if adoptions were more open. Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh further contend that fictionality, (including “what-if projections, if-only regrets, thought experiments, and hypotheses of all kinds”) is a “communicative strategy within some context … which informs an audience’s response to the fictive act” (Nielsen, 62-63). In short, fictionality gives rhetorical context to how an audience responds to the narrative.
In this sense, it is important to consider who such an audience might be that such narratives seek to engage, especially if the writer is concerned with changing minds and progressing social reforms. For works that directly engage with Lifton’s theory, the audience is mostly the discourse community. A discourse community is a categorization of ongoing conversation, specific to a certain topic which, over time, continues to build on and create new ideas. The adoption community is one important discourse community to consider in Ghost Kingdom narratives which is evident by not only the works that Lifton cited in her writings, but also in the way that adoptees continue to build upon her theory. By exhuming the history of discourse in the adoption community, specifically concerning Ghost Kingdoms, I have found that Ghost Kingdom narratives serve two distinct purposes: first, they use rhetorical narrative strategies to share social commentary which can be directed towards any general audience; second, they use discourse relevant to a specific discourse community, the adoption community in this case, to further build on previous notions of loss and grief. In doing so, Ghost Kingdom narratives employ rhetorical narrative functionalities that not only bring awareness to the gap in memories adoptees experience (something a general audience may not be aware of), but also that the fictions that result from ambiguous loss in adoptee experiences serve as a rhetorical argument for adoption reform in the actual world.
One of the most important clarifications about Ghost Kingdoms narratives is their position in relation to the actual world, specifically as it can be understood with possible worlds theory. Most textual examples of Ghost Kingdoms, including all three case studies I engage with, are fictional representations of the actual world which include a separate impossible kind of fiction created from the protagonist’s imagination. When thinking of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom through a possible worlds theory lens, Ghost Kingdom narratives accurately depict both the ontological position of the adoptee situated in reality and the possible worlds they create within themselves through mental activity because adoptees exist in both of these worlds simultaneously. From the literary perspective, Ryan explains in the Living Handbook of Narratology (LHN) that “the foundation of PW [possible worlds] theory is the idea that reality—conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physically—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds.” With this in mind, the Ghost Kingdoms that adoptees create are both the sum of the imaginable together with the reality they exist in physically. These fictions are adoptee responses to trauma and ambiguous loss, so while they can be categorized as possible worlds created fictionally by mental processes, they are also very real in that they are a result of and continue to affect lived reality. And when the narratives of these possible worlds are written, they serve as a fictional representation of an actual adoptee’s cognitive process in which they exist simultaneously in a plethora of possible imagined worlds in addition to the actual world.
Imagined worlds, or imaginary worlds, in fictional narratives are exactly what they sound like, and, according to David Langdon, are all “created by human, knowable intelligence, utilizing tools that can be described, replicated, and in turn, studied” (Imaginary, 141). Most often, discussion about imaginary worlds coincides with world-building fictional narratives such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or other such fantastical tales, but creating an imaginary world is second nature to most children and, arguably, in the case of extensive and detailed imaginary world-building, especially spanning from childhood to adulthood, it can be viewed as a coping mechanism against trauma. In her thesis for a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, Serena F. Konkin proposes that paracosms, a type of intense imaginary world-building, act “as a dissociative function in which the person escapes the body when it is in a state of traumatic stasis, providing a holding pattern to protect a fragile ego” (12). This is most certainly a relevant note to make in the context of Ghost Kingdom narratives because they primarily do fill a traumatic gap, but in Ghost Kingdom narratives, imaginary worlds are only part of the narrative structure.
Furthermore, many of the imaginary worlds, both in Ghost Kingdom narratives and otherwise, rely heavily on hinge moments that a what-if query seeks to answer. This can result in alternate timelines or counterfactual imaginations taking the spot of the created fiction in an otherwise realistic narrative. Since adoptees, as infants and minors, have no way to consent to the drastic decisions made about their lives, it is quite common for them to wonder about what could have happened if different decisions had been made. Sometimes referred to as uchronia or allohistories, an alternate timeline is a work of fiction that “emerge[s] from the difference between an established narrative timeline and a “what-if” scenario: if a given event is assumed to have gone differently, then the change in that event has repercussions for the flow of time beyond the point of divergence” (Carstocea, 184). When an adoptee wonders what could have happened if they had not been adopted, for example, an entire scenario, character, or both can be constructed as an alternate timeline. These scenarios can also be understood as counterfactuals which are “most often considered in connection with thought experiments … that cannot be realized” (Albrecht, Danneberg 12-13). This means that counterfactual narratives interrogate questions that seek to answer what could have happened if something had gone differently, but the fact of the matter is that whatever scenario is considered is impossible for the narrative it is a part of. Andrea Albrecht and Luz Danneberg say counterfactual imaginations are “when at least one of the assumptions is, at the moment they are made and relative to a certain (shared) knowledge, obviously false to both the author and the addressee of the imagination” (14). In the case of Ghost Kingdom narratives, alternate timelines and counterfactual narrative strategies are clear signposts of fantastic fiction, and they also serve as a rhetorical strategy to emphasize the need for fiction at all in wake of a traumatic gap in critical information in an otherwise realistic narrative.
Realistic narratives are stories that could potentially occur in the actual world in addition to featuring a narrative style focused on mimesis or a representation of the real world. But in Ghost Kingdom narratives, the emphasis is on the fictional aspect of the narrative even if the frame of the narrative is realistic. In many cases, the fictional aspect of these narratives present themselves as possible or imaginary worlds, alternate timelines, or counterfactuals, but any kind of extreme departure from an established realistic narrative style can function as an indicator that fiction is being used to fill a gap and regain cohesiveness in an otherwise reasonably possible narrative. Unnatural narrative elements can achieve such a strategy. Stefan Iversen “ties the notion of the “unnatural” to narratives that present the reader with clashes between the rules governing a storyworld and scenarios or events producing or taking place inside this storyworld—clashes that defy easy explanations” (Alber, Iverson, Nielsen, Richardson 103). This clash is normative for a Ghost Kingdom narrative to emphasize because the more drastic the clash between storyworld rules, the more emphasis that is placed on the gap that such a fiction is meant to fill. Additionally, Nielsen says that unnatural narratives “cue the reader to employ interpretational strategies that are different from those she employs in nonfictionalized, conversational storytelling situations” (104). Of course, depending on the narrative, these interpretations strategies can vary wildly, but so long as they are needed, especially in contrast with other parts of the narrative that do not require such cognitive gymnastics, Ghost Kingdom narratives can achieve an effective rhetorical move that essentially uses some fantastical fiction of this nature in order to make its point.
Additionally, an explanation for the realistic framing that so neatly encapsulates an obvious fiction within it is that Ghost Kingdom narratives are often written as a form of autofiction which is generally defined as “the fictional status of self-narration: even if the events and facts recounted are “strictly real,” the “adventure of language produces a fiction” (James 41). For my purposes, however, I will be calling Ghost Kingdom narratives a form of autofiction because they are fictionalized representations of real life as experienced by adoptees. They are not autobiographies or memoirs, though they certainly use fictionality to establish that tone, yet they are also not a simple version of fiction as they are largely mimetic and represent realistic adoptee experiences. As Alison James explains, works of autofiction “bring new attention to the interactions of the factual and the fictional” (56). Because Ghost Kingdom narratives use both realistic fiction and impossible versions of fiction simultaneously, there is a distinct meshing of narrative styles that occurs which, as James argues for autofiction, “allow[s] for a range of configurations of the fact/fiction relationship” (42). As a psychological theory, Lifton’s concept of Ghost Kingdoms has already rhetorically argued that fiction-making can be an instinctive coping mechanism for dealing with critical gaps of knowledge, but understanding Ghost Kingdom narratives as autofictions gives light to the symbiotic, not binary, relationship between reality and imagination. As Grishakova, Gramigna, and Sorokin say in their article, “Imaginary Scenarios: On the Use and Misuse of Fiction,” “In its double-edged capacity, fiction may help [with] molding the “real” into a subjectively more acceptable format of truthfulness or verisimilitude that resonates with felt experience” (Grishakova 116). I intend to argue towards this point as I examine three Ghost Kingdom narratives which all engage in this kind of interplay between fiction and reality in order to reveal the traumatic gap they all have in common.
As I will demonstrate in the three case studies that follow, Ghost Kingdom narratives take many different forms, but all serve one singular purpose: to fill some kind of traumatic gap of critical information that affects the perception of the self. There is portrayed, in the narratives that I will examine, queries that reflect the cognitive narrative theory that posits that our minds are programmed to understand and interpret life through narrative. For instance, we can all relate to asking ourselves what-if questions, escaping into daydreams, or making something fictional a part of our identities. And yet, very specific to the plight of the adoptee, these Ghost Kingdom narratives use possible worlds, imaginary worlds, alternate timelines, or unnatural narratives in conjunction with a realistic autofictional style to ask that one question that will hang over an entire life: what if there is more to know about me?