You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This article reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with six psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists about their relations with their own siblings (“What was it like to be a sibling in your family?”); how sister and brother issues come up in therapy (“… how your own sibling dynamics might play out in the transference”). Or, “In what ways do you feel it might have shaped the type of therapist you have become?” There were also questions of presence of sibling issues during training and in current theory. The power of such qualitative research lies in hearing the actual voices of these therapists, and their responses were striking. Some therapists, despite years of analysis and supervision, had never thought about their own sibling experience at all. Nevertheless, all therapists felt that their own personal experience as sisters and brothers had had a profound and lasting effect on them. One therapist said that since childhood “I feel a sense of guilt…. I still find it terribly difficult to say no.” Equally dramatic was the absence of existing sibling theory, including during training. All noted that there almost nothing about siblings in their training, “a real deficit.” Yet they stated that “siblings must be pivotal.” Another therapist, during the interview itself, came to realize that her own patient's difficulties had much to do with her broken relationship with her brother.
For many, the interview itself was therapeutic. Izzy, one of the participants came to a deeper realization of the importance of siblings in her clinical work during the interview, saying: “My sister is so angry with her parents and her sisters for what happened to her…. And there's something in me that's
thinking, ‘Put that all to one side’. That's the effect the transference is having on me: ‘Put that all to one side and make it up, because you've got sisters.‘ And I hadn't thought about that until we're sitting here.“ Another therapist, despite years of analysis, only realized