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This book sets out to redress a balance that is long overdue: the importance of the adult-child relationship has for too long overshadowed that of the sibling relationship, and the importance this plays in our development as children, and our adult relationships as well.
The author's cry could well be, ‘Siblings of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’ While child psychotherapists might be well acquainted with the complex area of sibling relationships, it is quite amazing that for adult psychotherapists the subject has not been dealt with conceptually or clinically in anything like the depth it deserves.
We, too, however, may unwittingly contribute to this gap in our knowledge because of our unconscious anxiety about a potential minefield of ambivalent feelings. Or, as Prophecy Coles asks, ‘Has psychoanalytic theory, in ignoring the place siblings have in the psyche, enacted the fantasy of the jealous sibling, who hopes that if he or she ignores the other siblings they will go away?’ (p. 19). Siblings, while discriminated against and marginalized in the psychoanalytic family, are unavoidably all around us! That they are rarely deemed to have the clinical or theoretical clout necessary for serious discussion and consideration may say more about our defensiveness than the possibility of a theoretical oversight.
In this context, each chapter of this short but hard-hitting book raises questions and opens subjects for debate and discussion that have never been raised in this way before, including: sibling transference and countertransference; Freud's view of siblings linked with his own personal experience; Freud's treatment of the Wolf Man case as linked with his self-analysis; how identification with siblings contributes to adult sexuality and relationships as well as the importance of sibling relationships in mental health; sibling incest - why it happens, when it is harmful, or not; brotherly and sisterly love; what makes the sibling experience dif