This famous replacement child worked through the existential replacement child condition in his writing.
Kleinian Psychoanalyst Mary Adams has just published a book on James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child (Routledge, 2023) in which she considers Ulysses and Finnegans Wakefrom the aspect of his being a replacement child. James Joyce was born into his parents’ grief, a year after they lost their first child. His father said James had ‘usurped the cot of his deceased elder brother,’ and Adams points out that the term ‘usurper’ frequently appears in the novels.
In my review of Mary Adam’s excellent book for the British Journal of Psychotherapy, due to appear in February 2023, Vol. 39, Issue 1, I write:
“Adam’s book is a beautiful, a poetic read, full of citations and references, and it shows how James Joyce found a creative way to transform his life, to re-shape his existence, by working through his replacement child trauma, and finding inner peace by his creative search for his original self. Joyce re-created himself in his unique language, no longer an usurper, but a unique, original writer, the greatest in the 20th century, in the view of many – including Orwell.”
The book is a great contribution for the therapeutic community and for replacement children who may feel both more understood and more understanding of themselves.
Mary Adams: James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child (Routledge, 2023) can already be ordered on Amazon here.
You can listen to Mary Adams introducing the book in a podcast here.
In the UK newspaper The Guardian (2 November 2022) Mary Adams writes, in a letter-to-the editor (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/02/louise-gluck-and-the-trauma-of-being-a-replacement-child) that Louise Glück, the American Nobel Prize Winner, is a replacement child. Adams describes “a deep resistance everywhere, including in the psychoanalytic world, to acknowledge this trauma”.
The 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux, is also a replacement child. She has published a book,The Other Girl, in the form of a letter to her deceased sister in which she openly shares how she has suffered in her childhood from comparisons with the ideal but absent sister (see also: https://patpalbooks.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/annie-ernaux-the-other-girl/
The replacementchildforum.com is advocating for replacement children since April 2020, reaching out to the public, those directly concerned as well as professionals from all psychoanalytical schools, to increase awareness, recognition and compassionate understanding for this trauma affecting adult replacement children (ARC).
Recognizing the deep and sometimes long-lasting effect the loss of a sibling can have one one’s adult life is already the first step towards healing.
May these voices encourage replacement children to pursue their self-discovery.