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.
The psychoanalytic study of the developmental significance of sibling relationships has suffered from a contempt of familiarity. The imminence of personal, familial, organizational, and clinical associations to the topic make it difficult to reflect upon it spontaneously with sufficient detachment (Segal, 1957). The impingement on our professional working selves of our own or others' sibling behaviors in our homes, clinics, psychoanalytic societies, or wider professional communities has left the familiarity and the vastness of the topic caught in defensive collusion between experience and theory. This has resulted in an overly exclusive emphasis on the effects of the primary relationship with the parents and the tendency to relegate the sibling to a “real object” model only.
Following Agger's 1981 essay, with its systematic definition and description of the nature of sibling relationships, one is repeatedly impressed by the perpetuation of perceptual lacunae in a representative