Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins her memoir, The Other Girl, written in the form of a letter, with a description of a photograph of an infant in an embroidered dress. The description ends with these startling words: “When I was little, I believe—I must have been told—that the baby was me. It isn’t me, it’s you.” (Italics mine.) 1

The “you” Ernaux addresses in her letter is Ginette, her older sister who died two and a half years before she was born. Ernaux’s parents refer to Ginette as “the little saint” up in heaven. She, Annie, is labeled “scruffy,” the nasty one who can never live up to her hyper-idealized dead sister.

As the author continues to study the photograph, she names the physical differences between herself and her sister, further establishing her own identity separate from Ginette, the ghostly presence that haunted her childhood. Though Ernaux never uses the term “replacement child,” The Other Girl depicts the author’s personal experience of the phenomenon, and the burden of fulfilling the expectations of parents grieving the death of a sibling.

One way parents assuage their grief following a loss is to conceive another child to replace the absent one. The new child comes into the world burdened with taking the place of a lost life. Many, like Ernaux, feel they can never measure up to the sainted lost sibling. Parental expectations that the substitute child bring them joy and fulfillment burden that child with an impossible goal: to heal the ungrieved sorrow of their parents.

In 1964, psychologists Albert C. Cain and Barbara S. Cain created the term “replacement child” to describe a child born to replace another who has died.2 Kristina Schellinski is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst who specializes in working with adult replacement children. In her book Individuation for Adult Replacement Children: Ways of Coming Into Being, she broadens the definition to refer to “any child conceived to replace a child or other family member, or who was born shortly after such a loss, or who replaced a sibling, family member, or other significant person during the years growing up.”3

In her decades of helping adult replacement children discover their unique and individual identity, Schellinski has refined her diagnosis of the........

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