The replacement child. Variations on a theme in history and psychoanalysis.
This paper reviews the literature on the replacement child syndrome and examines its historical, theoretical, and biographical ramifications. Although a replacement child in a literal sense is one conceived to take the place of a deceased sibling, the concept may be extended to many other situations in which a child is put in the place of someone else in the family system. In his experience of survivor guilt for his deceased brother Julius, Freud may be regarded as such a metaphorical replacement child. The collective tragedy of the Holocaust gives the replacement child concept a special meaning, since the children born in its aftermath had to fill the void in the lives not only of individual parents but of the Jewish people as a whole. One of the coauthors of this paper, Leon Anisfeld, was born after World War II to parents who had lost previous spouses and children, and his personal experience as a replacement child informs the theoretical issues considered here.
Anisfeld
L
L
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, USA.
Richards
A D
AD
D002648:Child; D016241:Child of Impaired Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006117:Grief; D006167:Guilt; D049673:History, 20th Century; D017767:Holocaust / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D017741:Survivors / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology*