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… As you may remember from earlier records Hans felt a strong aversion to the newborn baby that robbed him of a part of his parents' love. This dislike has not entirely disappeared and is only partly overcom-pensated by an exaggerated affection.7c
In a recent review1 we noted that siblings are rarely described positively. Descriptive language used by most clinicians to depict sibling relationships involves terms like envy, jealousy, rivalry, and fratricidal wish, which attempt to explain the motives underlying mutual hostility. Among individually and family-oriented psychotherapists, the experience of being a sibling is rarely described. Psychoanalytic literature and commentary is, surprisingly, almost devoid of reference to Freud's viewpoint about the relationships among brothers and sisters. The American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Indexing produced a cross referenced subject index on Freud's work which does not mention “brothers,” “sisters,” or “siblings.”14 While therapists may occasionally discuss sibling relationships with their patients, the sibling experience is rarely a major focus of treatment. With the single exception of Adler's notions about the power struggle between siblings, neo-Freudian theory takes almost no account of the sibling relationship as a major force in the life of an individual.
Sisterhood and brotherhood may be less conflicted and hostile than thought before. Recent clinical and experimental research suggests powerful, pervasive and positive reactions to sibling influence as it occurs in all stages of the life cycle.5, 16, 17, 18 Siblings may at times be more influential in each other's development than the parents.