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In the foreword to her book ‘James Joyce and the internal world of the replacement child’, Mary Adams tells us of her own grief at the death of her husband James Fisher, which interrupted their plans to collaborate using his writing on the imagination and clinical material from Mary’s patients. In her bereavement, she turned to the work of James Joyce, and in particular ‘Ulysses’ where she found themes of loss and grief that resonated and gave shape to her own experience. She also noted that other themes in the work such as guilt, abandonment, fear of condemnation, punishment and a sense of claustrophobia were also present in the material her ‘replacement child’ patients brought to her. Adams uses the term ‘replacement child’ to describe either those born into a family mourning the loss of an older sibling or those who experience the death of a sibling within the family at a young age.
It seems from the many descriptions of him by his friends and acquaintances that Joyce’s soul was restless and tortured for much of his life. Adams points to the themes of self-condemnation, isolation and anger to be found within his work. She describes something like a grieving process that can be traced through ‘Portrait of the artist as a young man’, ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans wake’; a grief for lost objects and a lost home in the form of Dublin and Ireland from which Joyce exiled himself. Despite this self-imposed exile, Joyce never stopped writing about Dublin, as if the only possible way to understand it was to extricate himself and view it apart and at a distance. Adams explores the self-banishment of the replacement child as seen in her patients as an alienation from family and belonging and which is also expressed in Joyce’s writing and in his self-exile from his beloved Ireland.
Adams maintains that through his writing Joyce comes to find a way of processing his own emotional experience, creating some space between himself and it, before it can be understood and properly claimed