The Only Child

This paper is devoted to the study of developmental conflicts in patients who are only children. In particular, attention is focused on conflicts relating to fantasy siblings and surrogate siblings. Since the absence of real siblings is the essential distinctive feature of the only child, one might expect that 'sibling conflicts' would be especially significant. This does not imply, however, that only children inevitably show some form of psychopathology. In fact, the widely prevalent notion that the only child is a special type of person who is neurotic, self-centered, unable to tolerate frustration, noncompetitive, demanding, and hypochondriacal may well arise from the envy and hostility felt by those individuals who are struggling with intense sibling rivalry.

Much of the early literature quotes G. Stanley Hall (1907) as having said that being an only child is a disease in itself, and many authors maintain that one may expect all only children to be problems. The present study, documented by psychoanalytic observations, attempts to demonstrate that this is a one-sided point of view, and one of the purposes of this paper is to redress the imbalance, especially as it appears in the psychoanalytic literature.

There is an enormous literature on the psychology of the only child. Most of it is not psychoanalytic in nature and concentrates on the study of behavioral traits. Using the condition of being an only child as the single constant factor, these studies attempt to establish some statistical correlation to certain