Prologue

Keeping in mind the credo of this journal that understanding of clinical phenomena is enhanced by viewing them from the multiple metapsychological perspectives of structural theory, object relations development, and self psychology, it seems timely to now address the nature of sibling relationships. The topic is deceptive in its everyday familiarity. We take its history for granted. However, our patients tell us repeatedly in their many languages that what may seem familiar is not at all obvious. To inattend is to inadvertently reinforce contempt for sibling objects and, further, to profane those early relationships that may have served to keep the other relationships, between parents and child, as it were, sacred. Freud addressed this possibility as early as 1897 in writing about endopsychic myths that may grow out of conflict in the nursery and be reflected throughout life within intrapsychic structures that govern our affective, cognitive and object investments.

Charting the course of sibling relationships from childhood into adulthood from several psychoanalytic perspectives may contribute to a much needed metapsychological assessment of sibling influence on early formations of the ego, sense of self, drive regulation, narcissistic advances, and development of object relations. Equally important is increased awareness of the transformations that take place over the span of time as maturation and oedipal effects are factored into mental equations. In Freud's “psychobiography,” for example, the younger sibling, Anna, who succeeded his previous short-lived sibling, Julius, while reportedly maligned and competitively treated early in life, became later in