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Understanding the great works of James Joyce is a formidable challenge, as is understanding the inner world of a replacement child, attested to by many a therapist's difficulties in diagnosing the condition in adult patients. Mary Adams is
looking at two principal works of Joyce, namely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, giving full consideration to James Joyce being born a year after the death of his brother, ‘his parents were still grieving’ (p. 1). A replacement child is one born to replace a sibling or given or taking on such a role later on. The replacement child syndrome can entail guilt and grief, identity and self-esteem issues, attachment and relational problems, and a preoccupation with life and death issues.
Joyce's father felt that his son James had ‘usurped the cot of his deceased elder brother. This feeling that his new son was a substitute was never to be admitted’ (Adams citing Jackson and Costello biographers of James Joyce, , p. 39).
Mary Adams is a Kleinian psychoanalyst, now retired, with decades of clinical experience and a great and insightful passion for literature, especially James Joyce. Her book is delightful to read and well researched, full of citations and references, with poignant quotes from his works, and her first-hand understanding of working with two adult replacement children in her practice. In an appendix, Adams lists famous replacement children from the arts, from Shakespeare and William Blake to Goethe and Kollwitz, Ibsen, Kafka, Yeats; from Beethoven to Mahler, Matisse, van Gogh and Dali, the latter two are some of the most researched replacement children. Self-examination and creative expression are two ways for a replacement child to reconnect with the true, original life force within. In accessing the unconscious, a new sense of self can be gleaned; Adams writes, Joyce finishes Finnegans Wake as ‘a legitimate son’ (p. 103), in Joyce's original way of writing we can also find his self-examination.
As I am more knowledgeable on the