The adoption experience, even under the best circumstances, may leave its mark on all stages of development. When it occurs after multiple placements, at eighteen months of age, it is bound to have a detrimental effect on the psychic structure of the child. This paper will focus on the impact of this primary rejection, compounded by subsequent ones, on the self esteem, superego, and identity formation of a woman who began analysis in her late thirties. It will show how the analysis helped modify her psychic structure, thus facilitating her ability to utilize a specific family romance fantasy that ushered in a movement from self representation of a cockroach to that of a woman.