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While there is a mass of material on childhood sibling experience, the entire area of internalised sibling experience in adults has remained largely unexplored. Why? One reason may be that Freud himself had unresolved, conflicting feelings about the death of his brother Julius, when Sigmund was seventeen months old. And indeed, for many of us, there may be unconscious, unresolved, feelings towards siblings, making this an uncomfortable area at which to look too closely. The idea of a sibling transference and countertransference seems plausible and interesting; yet is has never been given much thought.
Volkan & Ast's book is thus a ground-breaker. In the authors’ own words:
In our book, as psychoanalysts of adults, we analyse adults’ internal worlds in order to illustrate the fate of childhood sibling experiences and their pathological influences. We try to answer the underlying question: How does the adult's mental representation of a sibling evolve from that which he or she formed in childhood?
At first glance, the chapter-headings read like B-grade horror films: The Intruder; Insects, Fish, Birds and Animals; the Secret Restaurant; To Kill or to Repair; Dead Sibling Representations; Charon and Herakles; Living with a Dead Brother. However, while the text does not exactly flow, and the need to include fairly basic theory can be irritating at times, the mass of clinical material is thought-provoking and significant.
‘If one piece of the pie goes to the baby, then there will be less for me!’ is the theme in The Intruder, which focuses on the arrival of the new baby and the powerful feelings evoked in older children by the intrusion, and how this manifests itself in later life, leading to extreme competitiveness or passivity.
Internal sibling representation often occurs in symbolic form, and in Insects, Fish, birds and Animals we are given detailed clinical examples of how an animal, for example, can become the object of displaced unacceptable feelings towards a sibling. H