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As I read Johanna Dobrich’s Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis, a description about psychoanalysis returns to me: “the war within is never-ending” (Swartz, 2014, p. 3). Johanna Dobrich’s first book is a thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of this war within and what happens when it is shared. Drawing upon her clinical work, the personal experiences of psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and psychoanalytic sibling research, this book shows how the human experience can be shaped in unique ways by siblings, disability, and survivorship, and what this can mean for how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world. This new contribution to psychoanalysis makes meaningful connections between siblings and disability studies and addresses significant gaps in the field of psychoanalysis.
This book begins with an invitation into Johanna Dobrich’s inner world through reverie. I temporarily forget I am reading a psychoanalytic book as I am encountering and bearing witness to personal trauma that continues to reside within. I can see Johanna Dobrich, a mother in a dark room, drifting off into sleep, whose sleep is suddenly pierced by the cries of an infant. Her description of her psychic and bodily responses as a sleep-induced mother are so intimate and familiar that I feel called to join her as she chants “no no no—make it stop.” Within this mother lies the memories and automatic bodily responses of a little sleeping girl who has woken in terror, night after night, to the cries of her severely disabled brother. The distinction between the mother and the little girl are blurred, as well as whether these cries reside in the past or the present. The reverie has taken us back to a childhood filled with unpredictable dread and the very real possibility of death as Johanna Dobrich’s older quadriplegic brother experiences severe night time life-threatening seizures. This little Joey’s childhood is also punctuated by desperate parental demands to help, the impos