Revision Note: For publication purposes, this chapter was not initially posted, but proud to say that I finally managed to get this idea offically published in Adoption & Culture, vol. 14, no. 1.

When adoptees write, perform, and film narratives that represent Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, they open up doors that challenge us to renegotiate how we define fiction and how it interacts with reality and truth. Because of the trauma of adoption, the loss of biological family, and the lack of generational memory, adoptees often struggle to build cohesive identities and structured life narratives. When adoptees create Ghost Kingdoms or fictional inner worlds, they are filling a gap in their life narratives with a fantasy as a coping mechanism. In textual examples of Ghost Kingdoms, not only is the cognitive process of this coping mechanism demonstrated, but the text becomes a literary manifestation of unlived possibilities.

The discussion of Ghost Kingdoms, the psychological phenomena proposed by Betty Jean Lifton, is currently limited to the adoption community. This is most likely why discussions about or practices directly reflecting Ghost Kingdoms are few in number outside the adoption community itself. However, even if not explicitly recognized as such, the cognitive process of building fantasies and imagining counterfactuals to fill gaps in a life narrative has been addressed in both adoption and trauma scholarship. For instance, Elizabeth Alice Honig contends that adoptees “live with phantom lives, lives defined as possible but unlived” (215). These phantom lives, as she calls them, are similar to what Lifton calls the Ghost Kingdom; they are imaginings conjured by adoptees of those lives they might have lived. Just like Ghost Kingdoms, they are fictional possibilities and require readjusting if and when an adoptee might seek out more information about their history. Crucial to this identification of phantom lives, Honig explains, is the idea that they are “fictions through which identity is tested, adjusted, and defined” (216). In other words, these phantom lives that adoptees construct directly affect the ways in which they perceive and construct their own identities. 

In addition to Honig’s proposed phantom lives, in her analysis of the “(im)possible lives” of adoptees, Eleana Kim references Laurel Kendall’s chapter, “Birth Mothers and Imaginary Lives,” where Kendall identifies several alternative scenarios that adoptee and birth mothers may consider. From Kendall’s discussion of “possible stories” and “other might-have-beens,” Kim extracts the idea of “antiautobiographies,” adding the modifier “imagined” for those narratives that depict how “the phantom lives of adoptees are . . . marked by impossibility and haunted by the specter of social death—of having lived an abject, better-off-dead life” (117). In this way, there are two types of possible life stories that adoptees might imagine for themselves: one, another life where they remained with their families of origin, or the other, where social or even actual death could have occurred in the absence of being “rescued” (119). If the latter, as an “injunction to be grateful for being saved from a life of abjection” is used by adoptive parents as a weapon, this kind of counterfactual reasoning can leave adoptees feeling oppressed (119). Additionally, as Kim explains, “Adoptees’ struggle for personal and biographical coherence is often performed through a process of searching for and reuniting with birth parents as they seek definitive accounts of their adoption histories in order to ‘repair the broken narrative’” (127). Each of these scholars point out what most adoptees already know: that, as Kim says, when adoptees consider the counterfactuals of their lives, they “at least have control over a narrative of possibility” until that time when they must face reality in reunion (117). Having control over a narrative, no matter how realistic or far-removed it might be, is sometimes all an adoptee may have, especially if reunion may not be a realistic option. As Honig says about phantom lives, “Such narratives of possibility are familiar to anyone who has experienced a tremendous trauma, particularly one in which they were in fact powerless” (215). Infants cannot advocate to remain with their mothers for themselves, after all, and for any human, mother-loss is a devastating event. 

The concept of trauma is important to include in discussions about adoption narratives. In Anne Whitehead's book, Trauma Fiction, she explores the intersection between trauma narratives and fiction. In her introduction to the first part of her book, she notes that Cathy Caruth's work “suggests that if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formulation, then it requires a literary form which departs from conventional linear space” (6). This fits in neatly with the narrative forms I have encountered in my case studies, where another impossible kind of narrative is interjected into an otherwise realistic narrative. Whitehead goes on to explain that “the irruption of one time into another is figured by Caruth as a form of possession or haunting. The ghost represents an appropriate embodiment of the disjunction of temporality, the surfacing of the past in the present" (6). In other words, the entire idea of a ghost, especially as it relates to trauma, metaphorically represents a painful past, even a painful gap from the past, surfacing in present time. 

Though Lifton and the specific theory of Ghost Kingdoms are missing from these discussions, the repetition of terms like “phantom lives” and “ghost” indicate the likenesses among these ideas. Likewise, the concept of possible lives is similar to the possible worlds in fiction that often contend with thought experiments and counterfactuals. In both static imaginings of “phantom lives” and active searches for reunion with biological family, adoptees are seeking to address a fundamental gap in their life stories. By combining all of these ideas—Ghost Kingdoms, “possible lives,” ghosts, and trauma—there emerges a specific kind of coping mechanism and with it, specific narrative strategies that allow adoptees and their audiences to better understand the consequences of their trauma and even, perhaps, how to reconcile such gaps. What Lifton coined as a psychological theory is recognizable as its own form of narrative when adoptees use her theory as a framework for their stories. 

I aim to move the Ghost Kingdom discussion from psychological theory into narrative theory. I argue that Lifton’s concept of Ghost Kingdoms can help us understand both the coping mechanisms of adoptees and the symbiotic relationship between fact and fiction as it relates to adoptees’ narrative identities. Ghost Kingdom narratives demonstrate the cognitive need for fictional models within otherwise life-centered writing like biographies, memoirs, and autofiction. In adoptee-written works that employ fictional strategies to reflect such a need, the impossible fiction is a replacement for a crucial gap in knowledge about the character’s own identity. Perhaps, also, the work of fiction is itself the author’s replacement for their own crucial gaps of knowledge about themselves. To avoid empty speculation, I focus on the adoptee narratives analyzed in this study; however, this model can be applied to other life-writing that deals with knowledge gaps, particularly those related to trauma.

The narrative gaps that exist in adoptees’ life narratives are born of trauma, loss, and a lack of generational memory, among other things. Inherent to every adoption, there occurs a legal (or illegal) severance between biological family members, which is the one common thread of loss in all adoptee stories. Nancy Verrier famously called the separation of mother and infant the “primal wound” (xvi), but as Konkin notes, psychologists such as Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere have argued that infants “cannot distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’” (qtd. in Konkin 8); and according to Donald Winnicott, when the mother is “away for too long, the child ‘is altered,’ becoming traumatized” (qtd. in Konkin 9). For instance, some adoptees have very little information about the actual event of their birth. They may eventually, depending on the laws in their state or country, possess their original birth certificate or other medical or legal documents, but even these cannot tell the full story of such an event. Whereas kept children (children who are not adopted) might hear the story of their birth from immediate family members, the adoptee lacks such a foundation for the story of their life. The perfect example of such a gap being filled in with fiction can be found in Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, where Tee writes a fictional rendition of his own birth story in lieu of knowing the true details. 

Other common gaps in adoptee-written Ghost Kingdom narratives demonstrate a lack of knowledge about biological relatives, medical history, cultural history, generational memory, or genetic mirroring (which is regularly seeing someone you are related to and recognizing similarities). Consider, for example, the scene in @ghostkingdom where Brayden makes faces in the mirror in an attempt to correlate his possible sister’s physical features with his own. In hearing about and seeing ressemblances between them, he is demonstrating his own lack of genetic mirroring. Adoptee narratives also often depict the distinct pain of knowing there is information being purposefully withheld or discovering lies. An excellent example is the scene in Betwixt & Between when Lucy considers the possibility that her adoptive mother lied to her about her birth mother, which leads Lucy to realize how little she knows about her own situation. The different way each of the adoptee protagonists in these three case studies highlights their unique gaps of knowledge emphasizes how traumatic the myriad kinds of loss in adoption can be. Even in the best of adoption circumstances, there is loss and grief. This is where the fantasies of the Ghost Kingdom are created. 

In each of my case studies, the main characters struggle with a gap in knowledge that is traumatic because it directly impacts their perspective of themselves. In order to reconcile the missing pieces of life narrative and salve the emotional wound the adoptee characters withdraw into themselves. In a myriad of nuanced ways, adoptees do not have a cohesive narrative about their lives. The lack of this cohesive narrative directly affects the cognitive processes by which they build their identities. 

Understanding the relationship between lived reality and fictions created to escape or fill in the gaps of that reality are important to recognize as a cognitive process and coping mechanism. According to the APA (American Psychological Association) Dictionary of Psychology, cognitive processes are defined as “any of the mental functions assumed to be involved in the acquisition, storage, interpretation, manipulation, transformation, and use of knowledge” (“Cognitive Process”). Additionally, they define a coping mechanism as “any conscious or nonconscious adjustment or adaptation that decreases tension and anxiety in a stressful experience or situation” (“Coping Mechanism”). In the context of Ghost Kingdoms and the literary manifestations of them, the creation of an inner psychic realm is both a cognitive process and a narrative playground for what-if thought experiments like possible worlds, counterfactuals, and the like. In addition, the reason some adoptees may engage, consciously or subconsciously, in such a cognitive process is that they are lacking a significant piece (or pieces) of their life narrative, whether it is a birth story, the gift of genetic mirroring, or any other kind of critical information that, if possessed, might better inform them about themselves. 

Though creating a fictional fantasy or seeking out reunion to track down lost stories are not the only coping mechanisms adoptees might resort to in order to attempt to fill the narrative gap in their lives, it is an important one to consider because when these types of coping mechanisms are demonstrated through works of fiction, they can demonstrate the ways in which reality and fiction work not as opposites but in tandem. Even if fictional, an imagined possibility is true to the adoptee because it affects their actual world perspective. 

I cannot identify any of the three artifacts I examined with a strict definition of life-writing because none of them are purely autobiographical, in the sense that they portray the actions and events of a known person’s life. They are not memoirs or biographies, and their authors do not claim them as such. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain, “When we recognize the person who claims authorship of the narrative as the protagonist or central figure in the narrative—that is, we believe them to be the same person—we read the text written by the author to whom it refers as reflexive or autobiographical" (8). That is not the case for the film, the play, or the novel. Instead, these three case studies are versions of what Alison James calls autofiction which “allow for a range of configurations of the fact/fiction relationship” (42). Though autofiction remains a contested definition because some scholars prefer to emphasize either the auto (the self) or the fiction, what matters to this thesis is the combination of the two. Stylistically speaking, each of these texts all employ realistic fictional characteristics yet they also focus on a removed analysis of the self. 

However, I must still address the connections between the cognitive process of Ghost Kingdoms created by actual adoptees as coping mechanisms with the ideas of life-writing, because the texts I examined as case studies do portray, if fictionally, real-life cognition. Often, the genres of life-writing and fiction are viewed as opposite, but in cases like these, fiction is a necessary component for an author to employ when writing realistically about a life that could have been theirs. 

In order to portray the cognitive process of Ghost Kingdoms, these narratives use an intricate mix of narrative structures to portray deeply intimate constructions of adoptees’ inner lives. In the same way that Richard Gerrig defines a narrative gap as “a gap between what the narration reveals and the underlying story,” so too must the adoptee take what they can from what their circumstance reveals and accommodate the gaps in some way to make sense of theirtheir life narrative (20). Furthermore, even though the pieces I have studied are fictional, there are two separate kinds of fiction in each of them. One kind of fiction is mimetic; it portrays a character and a world that could absolutely be real in our world. I have already argued that although each of my case studies reflect in some way the real life experiences of the author, even if indirectly; this realistic fiction can be called autofiction, or fiction about the self. The other kind of fictional narrative employed is a kind of impossible fiction that the character creates, often inside themselves, to fill a critical gap of knowledge regarding the self. The kinds of impossible fiction that may be so employed to portray a gap can vary, but as demonstrated in my three case studies, I have identified possible worlds, imaginary worlds, alternate timelines, counterfactuals, and unnatural narratives. 

Brian Stanton’s film, @ghostkingdom, for example, takes place in what looks like the real world to the audience. Filmed during the pandemic, the setting is limited to a home office, an apartment stairwell, and an empty cemetery and the conversations he has with potential relatives on the phone and online make light mention of current events in America. The character, however, is how the audience knows that the film is not a self-reflective narrative, but a fictional one. It is only through interviews that the audience may discover the ways in which Stanton’s experiences led to the decision to write such a narrative. The plotline of @ghostkingdom follows Brayden, an adult adoptee, as he recalls the fantasy parents he imagined as a child while actively seeking out his father to address the gaps in what he calls “my truth” in his life narrative and identity. By raising the question of who out of three men might be Brayden’s father, Stanton uses possible world constructions to show how the character conjures up possible outcomes when he has no verified record of what could be real in the actual world. In doing so, a shift in narrative strategy from realistic to latent possibilities emphasizes the gap of knowledge itself that drives Brayden to both imagine fantasy versions of his mother and father. He does so both in periods of stasis with no available information, then actively seeks them out one by one later in life in what Lifton referred to as “crossing over.” 

This distinction between stasis and movement in an adoptee’s emotional journey processing all that their adoption encompasses is also significant in Maggie Gallant’s play, Betwixt & Between. In the play, viewers are introduced, again, to a world that resembles our own where recent New York legislation has allowed the main character, Lucy, to request her previously sealed original birth certificate. The majority of the play, however, takes place inside an imaginary world she finds herself in as she waits at the Vital Statistics office. She enters and exits this world through a portal, the chalk circle, much like Alice and the rabbit hole. In contrast with Stanton’s film, Gallant’s play reflects a potential identity that Lucy might have become had she remained with her birth mother instead of being adopted. Interacting with this imaginary character, Eloise, is a vital part of what convinces Lucy to move past her imaginary world and resolve, by the end, to seek out the truth when she exits her imaginary world. 

Matthew Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, also depicts a character in stasis who retreats in many ways to the use of fiction and internal realms to cope with a lack of information about himself. Not only does Tee hide the mysteries of his misunderstood emotions and ill-defined identity into an internal space he calls his container, he also knowingly composes a fictional rendition of his birth story in an attempt to fill the gap in his life story. Though these two coping mechanisms are realistically portrayed, the fantastic element of a ghost defies this narrative structure in order to portray the crux of Tee’s dilemma, which is that the ghost of his birth mother haunts him. It is not until he realizes he must ask his father for the true story that she materializes in full at the end. This ending suggests that for Tee to move out of stasis, he must confront the truth. 

In so many different ways, each of these narratives explores and emphasizes the main character’s gaps through fantastic fictional elements. Through possible worlds, imaginary worlds, and unnatural narrative elements, the audience can see that these fantastic elements function as filler for the holes each character struggles to reconcile in their life narratives. 

According to Henrik Skov Nielsen et al., “the use of fictionality is not a turning away from the actual world but a specific communicative strategy within some context in that world” (62). In other words, the use of fiction in and of itself is a rhetorical move that communicates something to its audience. They continue with: “Fictive discourse invites the reader or listener to imagine something—to ask, often tendentiously, ‘What if?’” (64). In the cases I have presented, not only has the audience been invited to ponder what-if scenarios in regard to the fiction itself; they have been asked to consider several layers of fictionality including “what if projections, if-only regrets, thought experiments,” possible worlds, and more within already fictional pieces (62). These case studies, in how they are structured and how they work as pieces of fictionality, include effective arguments such as moving from closed to open adoptions as Lifton first argued; allowing adoptees access to their birth records and ways to seek reunion as Stanton and Gallant’s pieces demonstrate; or simply opening others’ eyes to the grief and trauma adoptees are often left alone to untangle as Salesses portrays in his novel. Thus, the fiction allows the audience access to perspectives very relevant to conversations in the adoption community. 

However, this narrative phenomena should not be limited to adoptee-written narratives that feature Ghost Kingdoms; these are not the only narratives that might engage with such narrative tactics. I propose that, instead of the term Ghost Kingdom, which applies specifically to the adoption circle and alludes to Freud’s family romance, we instead move forward with what I call Phantom Worlds theory. Phantom Worlds theory acknowledges that any person who may experience a traumatic lack of knowledge about some critical aspect of their life that leads to grief, especially those that impact their self-perspective, might engage a cognitive process of fiction-making to fill in the said gap of knowledge. When this process happens in fiction, it effectively merges fiction-making of the impossible sort and life-writing which results in a kind of autofictional narrative that serves as a representation of how fiction is integrated as a part of a person’s lived reality. 

The name Phantom Worlds represents two notions. The first is an allusion to both Lifton’s theory and ghost schemas in general, with the word “phantom.” Though Phantom Worlds theory is not limited to the use of ghosts, the idea of ghosts in fiction is one so common that it has essentially been naturalized as a metaphor. In other words, when we encounter a ghost in a narrative, we come armed with a general idea of ghost functions and possible metaphorical meanings. Because of those schemas around ghosts, we can more readily interpret the narrative. Similarly, familiarity with Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory is equally as imperative to understanding Phantom Worlds theory. Beyond being another word for ghost, “phantom” is also etymologically related to words like phantasm and fantasy. They all trace back to the word phainein, which is the Greek verb for “to show,” “to bring to light,” or “to reveal.” This is important because, as I have demonstrated in my work thus far, the Ghost Kingdom narratives do not limit themselves to depictions of ghosts; they also use fantasy in order to emphasize a critical gap of knowledge pertaining to one’s perception of themselves. 

This connection to fantasy leads me to the second notion of Phantom Worlds theory, which is the connection to possible worlds theories. As I have pointed out, the Ghost Kingdom itself is an imaginary world, internal to the adoptee (and others in the adoption constellation) where a person may interact with counterfactuals and what-if possibilities in order to cope with the lack of information pertaining to one’s self-perception. These possible worlds are thought experiments as well as coping mechanisms that allow the person a way to fill a gap in their life narrative with fictional possibilities. As I have demonstrated in the preceding case studies, life-writing, especially realistic autofiction that interacts with impossible fiction, can effectively demonstrate a traumatic gap of knowledge about a character’s self and thereby share with audiences an example of the cognitive process associated with Ghost Kingdoms. Generally speaking, we usually separate life-writing like memoirs and biographies from fiction; however, in cases like the narratives I am focusing on, it is clear that fiction and reality exist in a symbiotic relationship with each other—especially when the writing concerns a significant lack of information to understand the self fully. Defined as literary manifestations, Phantom Worlds phenomena may also allow for a point of entry for other gap-related narratives to enter the discussion. I have high hopes that better understanding this phenomenon in adoptee-written works can open up new discussions of narratives that address other critical gaps of knowledge, too.