The choice of a surviving sibling as "scapegoat" in some cases of maternal bereavement--a case report.

THE EFFECT of the death of a child on parents and siblings has received considerable attention in the psychological literature. Cain and Cain (1964) have studied hereaved families and have described a common tendency to designate one of the other children as a replacement for the lost child. The substitute child is often and inviduously compared to his dead sibling and feels strongly that the definition of his own personality and the pattern of his life is precast by that of the deceased child. We have seen another mode of managing bereavement which also utilized one of the surviving children not as a replacement but as a scapegoat, an object for the displacement of parental;, particularly maternal guilt. In these cases, the loss of a child mobilizes a strong need to fix blame on a surviving older sibling who is unconsciously felt to have caused the loss of his envied sibling. Many years after the initial trauma, the relationship between the mother and the scapegoat child is bitter and estranged, filled with mutual provocation, unconscious feelings of recrimination and an extreme of hostility and punishment. A digression is in order, at this point, to review the meaning of the term "scapegoat"—a term use frequently from the early psychotherapeutic literature to the present, because of its descriptive power and emotional resonance. Overlapping with the use of the term as a word with wide colloquial meaning, is a recent usage to delineate a syndrome (Ackerman, 1971; Watzlawick, 1970). In this report, "scapegoat" refers to a syndrome as it began to be defined by Vogel and Bell (1968), and as described more recently in detail by Bermann (1973). In Semitic history, the scapegoat was the "guilt-bearer" laden with the sins of the tribe and driven out as a gesture of propitiation to an angry and vengeful deity. In Celtic history, the scapegoat or outcast assumed the,.debt of his kindred. Accountability for crimes against persons or property was equally shared by clan members but the penalty demanded could be displaced to one member and he could be driven out of communal life, isolated, excoriated but not killed. The Celtic oral tradition tells us of female rulers, druids and divinities but contains no reference to outcasts (Chadwick, 1964). Scapegoats in Semitic history came from the priest caste which was composed exclusively of males. "Guilt-bearers" in the psychological literature, as .well as our sample, were of both sexes. Later, in complex urban societies a subgroup was chosen as scapegoat, always