ABSTRACT
Coping theory and the bereavement analogy have their origin in past accounts of creatures substituted by devils, witches and fairies, as the explanation for the arrival of a disabled child. Having long disowned the theory in that particular form, psychiatry has conserved it by imputing the concept of child substitution to parents instead; the appearance of a disabled child implies the existence of another child who has been taken away and for whom the parents mourn. Changeling theory has replaced this general signifier with an image of the wrong child, an individual on whom the whole weight of the world’s disorder is projected. Over the course of the nineteenth century, changeling stories entered the burgeoning literary genre of compilations of world folklore. It is hard to distinguish expert theological tradition from popular folklore in the historical construction of intellectually disabled changelings, if only because nothing in the folklore tradition can be shown to predate its representation in printed texts.
