ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the inscription of a dead child in the maternal psychic economy and its elegiac transmission as an atmospheric surround of a subsequently born child, the so-called replacement child. The ghosting of the intersubjective transforms a sense of place into no-place, creating a background ill-at-easness that disturbs any sense of home with mute suffocation: something is at once too present and too absent. The ghosting of the mother deranges the psychic economy of the child who has been nominated to carry the spectral prefigurations of the ghost. The incorporation of the psychic body of the mother's extruded object of impossible mourning exerts a force on all relational and intrapsychic economies that is like a strange attractor. The ghost-within haunts the subject and the intersubjective through the evocation of non-linear repetitions. Strange attractors are one outcome of non-linear systems. Predator-prey systems can also be limit cycle attractors.
