Reviews

Sibling Relationships

Prophecy Coles (ed.)

London: Karnac, 2006

253 pp., £19.99, paperback

This book sets out to fill a gap. The editor, Prophecy Coles, states in her introduction that ‘there is no general acceptance that our relationships with our siblings help to structure our psychic world’, maintaining that there has been a serious lack of theoretical attention to sibling relationships in psychoanalytic theory. In contrast, there is a huge quantity of psychoanalytic literature devoted to elaborating and exploring the Oedipus complex, with its core vertical structure of parents and child. The authors in this book draw our attention to the horizontal dimension typified in sibling relationships. The book is seen as a gathering together of a new interest in the importance of siblings in psychoanalytic thinking. The editor looks to the world of art and literature to support this view, ascribing the interest to a broadening of the scope of psychoanalysis and a consequent lessening of the tendency to idealise the analyst as an authority figure, leading to a ‘greater democracy in the consulting room’ as the idea of a sibling transference might feel less threatening to the process. She also looks to changing cultural patterns, where the ‘blended’ family is becoming much more usual. This may require reassessment of some of our basic ideas about what the norm is in sibling relationships. These days a person is increasingly likely to have half- and step- as well as full siblings, although this particular aspect is not addressed in the book. What is presented is, first, an interesting look at the role of siblings in English literature and culture, in order to try and broaden our understanding. The second section focuses on theory in an attempt to incorporate thinking and observation into a psychoanalytic theoretical base, whilst acknowledging a lack of clinical material, which would obviously illustrate and give necessary weight to the arguments.

The section on culture and liter