Sibling Death as a Psychological Experience with Special Reference to Schizophrenia

It has elsewhere (3) been shown statistically on the basis of data from 356 adequate individual histories that male schizophrenics have up to twice as much chance (39 per cent) of experiencing sibling deaths as do certain control groups (manic-depressives, general paretics, and normals). While still considered tentative this finding holds even when size of family and similar extraneous variables have been statistically controlled. The majority of such deaths as were noted involved siblings younger than the patient and occurred before the patient had reached the sixth year of life. When parental deaths were considered along with sibling deaths, it was found that 61 per cent of the schizophrenics had one or both of these possible experiences in their anamnesis. They were in this respect differentiated from all three control groups with statistical significance.

These results, especially as regards the death of siblings, are, in keeping with current knowledge, best interpreted psychosomatically.1 A possible constitutional weakness of the schizophrenic in respect to emotional experience may be regarded as having been acted upon by the disrupting effect of the deaths. On the assumption of a strong hostility to the sibling that dies—whether founded primarily upon rivalry or upon aggressive components in ambivalent libidinal trends—guilt would be acutely intensified in the survivor by the event. A groundwork would thus be laid for a disturbance of the normal transfer of social patterns from the familial constellation to the extra-familial milieu and for a complementary tendency toward filling the social void with substitutive fantasies. Sibling deaths might be accordingly construed as one factor in the production of schizophrenic behavior patterns.

Since it was the psychogenic aspects of the problem which in large measure actuated the statistical study, the present report is devoted to certain relevant qualitative material. The interpretation

From the Research Service of the