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What a pain siblings can be. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least, they are foremost—if not exclusively—our competitors over limited resources. Cain murders his brother Abel after the latter curries God's favour; Esau wrestles his twin brother Jacob in utero, vying for dominance before even entering the world; sisters Rachel and Leah spend most of their biblical narrative trying to win their shared husband's fickle attention.
Sigmund Freud—arguably the most influential individual on secular culture in the twentieth century—did little to reshape the ancient notion of rivalry as the singular feature of the sibling dynamic. “The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder,” Freud (1900a, p. 250) wrote in a rare moment of acknowledging that these relationships even exist. Though this derision may have roots in a personal neurosis—borne of contentious relations with his own brothers and sisters (Coles, 2003)—it is more instructive to consider Freud as one link in a very long chain, a torchbearer of the millennia-old effort to write the narrative of human nature.
It is in this regard that siblings are most vexing. To the theologian or theoretician seeking universal truths, siblings generate an unwelcome chaos: they disrupt parsimonious ideas of how we develop and why we are the way we are. For ancient authors of religious texts, siblings complicated the relationship between man and God; for Freud, they muddled the primacy of the Oedipus conflict, a triangulation that demanded unmoderated lines between child, mother, and father. Beginning in the 1960s, John Bowlby, a major post-Freudian torchbearer, emphasised the vertical relationship between mother and child as the defining characteristic of the human species. Even though, by 1983, Judith Dunn had written that “it is now widely acknowledged that regarding mother and child as a dyad isolated from the other relati