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This edited volume, arising from a series of London conferences in 2007, may be read as part of an ongoing response to the puzzle about why the emotional significance of the sibling relationship has been “relatively neglected in the literature of child development, family dynamics, and psychoanalysis” (Margaret Rustin, p. 147; see also Vivienne Lewin, p. 69). In the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, the recently increased attention to siblings is due in part to a series of books by Juliet Mitchell (2003), but there seem to be other contributing factors of a professional, theoretical, and perhaps sociological nature. Some aspects of these developments have already been discussed in this journal (Benhaïm 2008; Levin 2008) and they are further explored in this new book.
Siblings in Development will reward the attention of not only child and adult analysts and psychotherapists, but also family and marital therapists and infant observers. To reap this reward, however, the reader may have to do a bit of extra work that probably should have been done by the editors, because the organization of the book is confusing. Much of the original conference series upon which the book is based was focused on twins in particular, rather than siblings in general. That the title refers more broadly to siblings and not at all to twins, in spite of the preponderance of material on twins, suggests that the thinking implicit in the conception of the book has not quite been born yet and requires a good deal of post-publication reverie and synthesis in order to emerge in the mind of the reader. Compounding this problem is the unevenness in the flow of the chapters. For example, the editors' introduction, which summarizes the contents in a way that somehow fails to entice, is followed by a candidate's report on an infant observation of a young middle-class family with newborn twins. Covering a span of 2 years postpartum, the report itself is interesting, sophisticated, and relevant, but it