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Brothers and Sisters is published as the 17th volume in the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology under the general editorship of David Rosen, McMillan Professor in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M. The Fay Lectures are an annual series, modelled after the Terry Lectures at Yale, where eminent Jungian analysts share scholarly ideas about some aspect of analytical psychology. The lectures are then published by Texas A&M University Press. In 2009 A&M took the extraordinary initiative to begin publishing full-text, open-access, digital editions of each of these volumes which are available for free and which can be found here: tamupress.com.
In true Jungian style, Abramovitch begins with active imagination by way of prelude:
Imagine the sister or brother you would most like to have….
Now think about the brother or sister with whom you have the most complex relationship…. Much of what I will say in this book lies in that painful space
Page 160between your ideal sibling and your real ones, between the myth and the reality (p. 1, italics in original).
Any reader with a sibling will know the great gulf that lies between these two situations. As one such reader, I picked up this volume with great enthusiasm. I have often wondered about the relative lack of literature relating to sibling dynamics. (Noteworthy exceptions are Mitchell [2000] and Coles [2003]). I see them as the horizontal axis of development vis-à-vis the vertical axis of parental relationships, which have hogged the limelight in psychoanalytic literature (in its broadest sense) for too long. I consider the horizontal axis warrants as much attention and analysis as the vertical, as well as matters such as birth order, which Abramovitch touches on in his first chapter. Step-siblings or blended families are not within the purview of Abramovitch's book and so will not be discussed further in this review. However, there is clearly work to be done by Jungian analysts in these areas of pressing contempor