Betty Jean (BJ) Lifton, PhD, is a writer and adoption counselor, who is one of the leading advocates of adoption reform. She is an authority on the psychology of the adopted child, birth parents, and adoptive parents, as well as the complexity of search and reunion. She has offices in Cambridge, MA and New York City, and also does telephone counseling across the country. Her standard poodle, Lady Jingly Jones (known as Jingly), is her co-therapist in Cambridge, and reminds her clients that there must have been a method to Freud's madness in keeping chow dogs in his consulting room. Today we call it animal-assisted therapy.
Dr. Lifton is the author of Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience and Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness, as well as many other books on the subject of adoption. She has written about children who have been orphaned or separated from their families by war and the Holocaust ― Children of Vietnam, A Place Called Hiroshima, and The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak. She has also written numerous picture books for children and young adult books. Many are original tales set in Japan, where she lived for many years, and some are based on Japanese legends. Three of them have adoption themes: Tell Me A Real Adoption Story, Kap the Kappa, and The Silver Crane.
In addition to her books and clinical practice, Dr. Lifton has lectured and held workshops throughout the US and abroad on the psychology of the adoptive family, and on Janusz Korczak, one of the world's first children's rights advocates, who gave his life for the orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto.
©2006 Betty Jean Lifton
