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  • The Replacement Child: Solomonic Justice and the Sublimation of Sibling Envy
  • Donald Capps (bio)

In her moving essay in American Imago on the psychology of the “replacement child” as a widespread response to the traumatic loss of a child after a violent historical event, Gabrielle Schwab (2009) tells how she was finally able during her psychoanalytic training analysis “to confront what I had known all along, namely, that so much of my life was shaped by an older brother who died as an infant during World War II, before I was born.” She adds that the “bare recognition” of this fact “had hit me years earlier, and I remember this instance with the clarity of an epiphany.” She was teaching at the time at the International Summer School for Critical Theory in Santiago de Compostela in Spain during the summer of 2000: “Lost in my own thoughts before going to sleep, I was keenly hit full force by a flash of insight; I have always felt guilty for owing my life to the death of my brother who was killed during the war” (p. 279).

She had long been aware of the role her imaginary brother played in her life, as the source of innumerable fantasies and “family romances” in which she designed parallel lives for the two of them: “In some, he simply took my place, and I imagined how he would have acted differently as the strong and defiant boy I fantasized him to be. In others, I imagined our family included him as my older brother who protected me and took me on adventure tours” (p. 279). But now, having recognized her underlying guilt, she tried writing “as a form of processing and working through my feelings about this brother whom I never knew (if not as a form of mourning him).” She wanted to leave a testimony for him, something that would carry his memory for her own sons and perhaps their children as well. She wrote a sequence of poems, two of which are placed at the beginning of her essay. She had not planned to include [End Page 385] this personal revelation until she realized that otherwise she “would continue to uphold the silence that has covered the role of this traumatic memory in my family of origin” (p. 279).

When I read these paragraphs of the essay, I recalled the case of Douglas O’Duffy in Ana-Marie Rizzuto’s The Birth of the Living God (1979). Douglas was the tenth and last-born sibling and two brothers had died in infancy. He accused his parents of having enough love for eight children—seven living and the first dead boy—but not for all ten, the two exceptions being himself and his other dead brother who, unlike the first dead brother, was never mentioned by name (pp. 112–113).

I also thought of Alice Miller’s account in The Untouched Key (1990) of her participation in a discussion about the painter Käthe Kollwitz in conjunction with an exhibit of her works in Zurich in 1981. Reading Kollwitz’ diaries after viewing the paintings enabled Miller to understand why the paintings seemed so overwhelmingly depressing: Käthe was one of four siblings to live beyond childhood. Her mother’s first two children died at a very early age and her last-born child, a son, died of meningitis when he was one year old. Noting that the paintings depict dead children and an older woman who entrusts herself to death, Miller contrasts the feelings that the mother has toward her dead child and her living children. The living children “must be dutifully cared for and raised in a way to rid them of their bad behavior and make them acceptable in the future,” and this being the case, “to be too affectionate would be dangerous, for too much love could ruin them” (p. 28). It’s a different matter in the case of her dead child, “for that child needs nothing from her and does not awaken any feelings of inferiority or hatred, does not cause her any conflict, does not offend her.” And since she need not be afraid of spoiling the child...

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