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“Sibling Violence, Trauma, and Reality” left me with a strong wish to respond, and I am grateful for the chance to do so. I write in a spirit of conversation, having made my peace with the infinitesimal risk of disclosing too much about others or myself. I would like to convey a sense of how very odd it is to read a partially disguised and much distilled version of my life, especially on first reading.
The psychoanalytic guild no doubt has its rules, written and unwritten, about what constitutes sound “disguise.” The need to preserve confidentiality and the anonymity of all parties is obviously crucial. But are all disguises, omissions, and resulting distortions equally neutral or effective? Do they not add a whole layer of unwitting or implicit “interpretation”? Whom do they serve? These are serious matters, I think. I hope that my raw response might help articulate some of the possible stakes.
I also have things to say about what lingers in my mind, long after the initial disorienting encounter with this paper. Over time, the specific details and distortions have already come to matter less, and the larger, transferable insights about siblings may indeed trump the mild violence done to my particular experience. My “response” to this paper, in short, has evolved over time, and this too might be instructive.
So let's start with my initial reading. I found myself laughing at first, as though I'd been invited to hop onto a ride at the county fair. Part gentle roller coaster, part goofy, homely house of horrors, the kind meant to give a kid a fun shiver, not a real scare, the kind where adults bump their heads and trip, because the scale is Lilliputian. I have been given an amusing disguise that I am not yet used to, and I am about to enter into a script that