The Replacement Child: Solomonic Justice and the Sublimation of Sibling Envy

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