James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child
Mary Adams – Member of the British Psychoanalytic Association
Series: Routledge Focus on Mental Health
Please find here the Podcast on James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child by Mary Adams
In this episode, Mary Adams delve into issues related to the trauma of being a replacement child. She illustrates this with the example of James Joyce, as “he seemed to overcome the debilitating effects of this early trauma and survivor guilt by using his writing”.
Link to the paper here:
Mary Adams is a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytic Association, having completed her training in 1996. She was a training analyst with the Association of Child Psychotherapists, has a particular interest in the work of Donald Meltzer and has written several papers using his ideas. She is a past editor of the Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapy. Her book on James Joyce as a replacement child was published by Routledge in 2022.
This book is an exploration of the internal world of James Joyce with particular emphasis on his being born into his parents’ grief at the loss of their firstborn son. Mary Adams links Joyce’s profound sense of guilt and abandonment with the trauma of being a ‘replacement child’ and compares his experience with that of two psychoanalytic cases, as well as with Freud and other well-known figures who were replacement children. Issues such as survivor guilt, sibling rivalry, the ‘illegitimate’ replacement son, and the ‘dead mother’ syndrome are discussed. Joyce is seen as maturing from a paranoid, fearful state through his writing, his intelligence, his humour and his sublime poetic sensibility. By escaping the oppressive aspects of life in Dublin, in exile he could find greater emotional freedom and a new sense of belonging. A quality of claustrophobic intrusive identification in Ulysses contrasts strikingly with a new levity, imaginative identification, intimacy and compassion in Finnegans Wake.
The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as students of English literature, psychoanalytic studies and readers interested in James Joyce.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction 1. Freud. His lost brother and ‘dead mother’. 2. Images of Joyce.
‘This bizarre and wonderful creature’ 3. The ‘Dead Mother’. ‘Dark Lady’, ‘ghoul,
chewer of corpses!’ 4. Joyce’s Father, An Only Child. The only son of an only son of
an only son. 5. Guilt and Persecution. Intrusive identification and the world of
the claustrum. 6. Imagination vs Fantasy. The ineluctability of the proleptic
imagination. 7. Joyce: Prose Poet. Language, music and emotion. 8. Gogarty: The Lost Brother. James Joyce, ‘Buck Mulligan’ and the Martello Tower. 9. The Sorrow of Ulysses. ‘Deathflower of
the potato blight on her breast.’ 10. Medievalism to Modernity. His Own ‘Book of Kells’. 11. Finnegans Wake. The Poetry of the Dream.
