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SYSTEMATIC CLINICAL STUDIES OF SIBLING EXPERIENCES have not been carried out with a focus on healthy or progressive development. Traditionally, in psychoanalysis, the advent of a younger child has been viewed as traumatic to the older sibling. Most of the reports regarding siblings, especially the psychoanalytic clinical studies, have placed the main emphasis on sibling rivalry and on the burdens to a first child when the second child enters the family. To some extent, as in most clinical research, the attention has been given to what is "noisy," i.e., what is associated with deprivation, conflict, or distortion; whereas those children who develop well and progressively are relatively "noiseless"; they do not demand or invite our clinical and theoretical scrutiny.
Utilizing data and theoretical propositions formulated during the Yale Longitudinal Study and the Psychoanalytic Study of a Family, we propose in these reports to examine the sibling experience with an emphasis on those aspects that promote growth and development. In order to provide a manageable frame of reference, we initially limited ourselves to a family with two children, 4 and 2 years of age. In this way we could identify assumptions, observations, and formulations some of which would be valid in principle for families with more than two siblings, with differing ordinal positions, and with a variety of age differences. At the same time, there will be differences