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How sister gazed at sister
reaching through mirrored pupils
back to the mother
Sibling relationships often last throughout one's life, usually outlasting parents' presence. However, even if a great span of one's development is spent with siblings, it has long been assumed that their influence was greatly overshadowed by parental influence. Consequently, relations between siblings have been considered principally in terms of their interference with parent—child interaction. Birth order studies (Rosenberg and Sutton-Smith, 1970) have attempted empirical explorations of the effect of siblings on each other, and family systems theory (Bank and Kahn, 1975) has paid some attention to sibling subsystems but the psychodynamics of the sibling relationship have remained relatively unexplored. In their exhaustive review of “The Psychoanalytic Literature on Siblings,” Colonna and Newman (1983) note how sparse the literature on siblings seems to be at first glance, as demonstrated by the surprising absence of the term “siblings” in the index of the Standard Edition and of a large number of general texts on psychoanalysis.
Other authors have also drawn attention to the neglect of the subject of sibling relationships. Szalita (1968) and Lesser (1978) both note that, in individual psychotherapy, issues of sibling transference and countertransference tend to be lost among parent—child considerations and that this omission can have a detrimental effect on the therapeutic outcome.