ABSTRACT
In the proper cases of child replacement, the conscious and unconscious emotional investment is more specific, and the psychological consequences for the new child more extreme. In all the cases of replacement children they studied, Cain and Cain found that the attempt to 'replace' was totally dominated by the image and memories of the dead child. These authors identified two prominent features in the families of such children: what they call the premorbid personalities of the mothers (depressive, phobic, or compulsive) and the parents' excessive narcissistic investment in the children who had died. As a result, the substitute "was born into a world of mourning, of apathetic, withdrawn parents, a world focused on the past and literally worshipping the image of the dead". This chapter provides the cases of child replacement. It presents the material on child replacement that provides an illustration of those psychological phenomena of identity distortion, often on the border between normality and pathology.
