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This recent publication by Kristina Schellinski, a senior analytical psychologist with the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the subject of the ‘replacement child’ condition. The book is structured in 11 chapters, covering such topics as Famous replacement children; Identity; Working through grief; and Treatment, prevention and transgenerational transmission. It also includes numerous clinical cases, some 15 illustrations of paintings and statues, and an extensive bibliography.
Throughout the book, Schellinski presents a variety of phenomenological and psychodynamic descriptions of the adult ‘replacement children’ condition, attempts to understand the deep-rooted reasons for their suffering and sense of identity confusion, and offers therapeutic suggestions on how they may emerge from their predicament.
In each chapter, under the heading On a personal note framed alongside the main text, the author bravely discusses her own experience of coming to terms, as an adult, with the loss of her 2-year old brother Wolfgang, who died when their mother was already three months pregnant with her. ‘When I felt no longer the need to be like my brother’, she writes in one of the last of these notes, ‘I became freer to become myself … as I no longer believed that I owed my life to his disappearance’ (p. 164). Her own personal case, however, as well as many of the others discussed here, raises for me fundamental questions concerning the definition itself of replacement children.
In the author's view, such a definition should include those individuals whose identity as replacements of a deceased person is attributed to them by others (mostly a close relative), or those who self-identify themselves with that role. In my own view, ‘replacement children’ should refer only to those who have been conceived by their parents (for a complex mixture of conscious and unconscious reasons) in order to replace another one who had recently passed away