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WHEN WE CONSIDER THE ROLE OF SIBLINGS WE PROBABLY think immediately of the ordinal position of siblings and its effect on the child and of sibling rivalry. I shall begin by citing a vignette from Anna Freud's book, The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense(1936), because it illustrates a number of points.
She was the middle child of several brothers and sisters. Throughout childhood she suffered from passionate penis envy, relating to her elder and to her younger brother, and from jealousy, which was repeatedly excited by her mother's successive pregnancies. Finally, envy and jealousy combined in a fierce hostility to her mother. But, since the child's love fixation was no less strong than her hatred, a violent defensive conflict with her negative impulses succeeded an initial period of uninhibited unruliness and naughtiness. She dreaded lest the manifestation of her hate should cause her to lose her mother's love, of which she could not bear to be deprived… As she entered upon the period of latency, this anxiety situation and conflict of conscience became more and more acute and her ego tried to master her impulses in various ways. In order to solve the problem of ambivalence she displaced outward one side of her ambivalent feeling. Her mother continued to be a love object, but, from that time on, there was always in the girl's life a second important person of the female sex, whom she hated violently. This eased matters: her hatred