Siblings: Sex and Violence. Juliet Mitchell. Polity Press, 2003

The opening words of Juliet Mitchell's eagerly awaited Siblings filled me with a feeling of excitement and envy. How could I bear to read the book I wanted to have written?

There is a great deal in this book that might generate further thinking in the way we approach Group Relations interpretations. I can only throw out a few thoughts that have particularly struck me and hope more debate will follow. Though this is not a book with a focus on Group Relations, I found myself wondering about how her ideas may enhance the thinking in this field.

I had discovered Mitchell's book Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000) (sitting unread among my bedside mess of books and papers and things) at a time while searching the psychoanalytic literature for references to sibling dynamics and looking for help in thinking about inter-group phenomena of hatred and rivalry and linking it with a paper I was reading by Slavov Zižek about the outbreak of ethnic violence when the Soviet Union was dismantled. It had suggested something of sibling hatred in its visceral intensity.

It came as quite a shock to find that index after index in book after book failed to offer much more than a passing comment about siblings. Was there really no psychoanalytic theory based on lateral relationship?

Mad Men and Medusas brought to light some new thinking about hysteria with relation to peer and sibling experience. ‘Siblings’ develops and elaborates this theme and searches deeper and wider to discover the paradigm shift required to formulate a theory that would give the lateral dimension to the vertical relationships of classical psychoanalytic thinking.

She writes, ‘we need a paradigm shift from near-exclusive dominance of vertical comprehension to the interaction of the horizontal and the vertical in our social and in our psychological understanding’,