Il bambino di sostituzione.

In 1964 Cain and Cain in their seminal paper On replacing a child, described the situation of 6 children who were born after the loss of a sibling in the family, and that were charged by their families with the irrealistic wish of restoring to life the died child. Many studies described since then the psychological consequences of this dangerous start, which imposes to the newborn the out of reach standard of the idealized memory of the lost child thus projecting a dark shadow on their life. After reviewing some of the principal studies devoted to the argument, we discuss the peculiarity of the condition of being a replacement child in the context of a family were a child was attained by cancer. We focus finally on the the results of a phenomenologic-hermeneutic study in which the parents of children suffering from brain tumors, in therapy at the Neurosurgery Unit of the A.Meyer Pediatric Hospital in Florence, accepted to share with the research group their life experiences, in an attempt to provide usefulf information and insight for other families that must face the same complex and painful condition, and for the health care professionals who take care of them. We focus on the testimony of a couple who had a second child one year after the death of their first child.