[The child as a substitute]

The feeling of temporarily not being oneself is a common phenomenon, with many manifestations in normality and psychopathology. I relate it here to the Freudian category of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) and to the literary device of the double (der Doppelgänger) and I consider the splitting in the ego and the distortion of the sense of identity to be their main psychological characteristics. An extreme instance of this phenomenon is represented by the replacement child, that is a child conceived with the conscious purpose on the part of its parents of substituting a dead sibling. Replacement children inevitably suffer from a sense of confusion in the area of self-identity and often display serious difficulties in the development of self-esteem and in the establishment of mature object-relationships. As illustrations of some of the problems encountered by replacement children, I briefly refer to the experiences of two great artists (Van Gogh and Dali) and I use clinical material from two of my psychoanalytic patients.