The Importance of Sibling Relationships in Psychoanalysis

Prophecy Coles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921032
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book concentrates upon families where there is more than one child. It distinguishes between a sibling transference and a parent/child transference and illustrates the interweaving of the developmental strands between the two types of transference.

Chapter One

The sibling transference

It is rare to find a psychoanalytic book on theory or technique in which siblings play a part in the way the internal world is conceived. There are a few publications, (Agger, 1988; Bank & Kahn, 1997; Colonna & Newman, 1983; Mitchell, 2000; Sharpe & Rosenblatt, 1994) in which, with the exception of Mitchell, the work has been centred in the U.S. There is little reference to the concept of a sibling transference in the analytic journals and when it is mentioned, it is analysed as a displaced oedipal transference.

I first began to wonder about a sibling transference and the role of siblings in our internal world, when I had become stuck for a very long time in a therapy with a female patient, Mrs K. She would repeat an endless litany of her sins and I could make no inroads into her impacted superego. One day she mentioned her elder sister in a way that helped me to grasp that we had been locked into a transference enactment, in which I was this hated sister. It was a striking moment when I took up the sibling transference with her, for it allowed us to unlock a ruthless venom that had been hidden away in one of the harshest superegos I have encountered. For years she had lain on the couch, bottling up her revengeful hatred of me and, instead, had torn herself to shreds. She had experienced me in much the same way as she had experienced her bossy elder sister, and I had not been aware of this possibility (Coles, 1998).

Until that moment, I had never thought about a sibling transference, and I had certainly never read about it. There is no reference to a sibling transference in any of the psychoanalytic dictionaries and Colonna and Newman (1983) are the first writers to draw attention to this fact. The idea that a therapy could become stuck in an undiagnosed sibling transference was not an idea that I had come across.

From the experience with Mrs K, and others, I have come to believe that an extremely harsh superego is often one of the hallmarks of sibling difficulties. Children can be extraordinarily cruel to each other and I hope the following clinical example will give some idea of the relationship of a harsh superego to an experience of sibling cruelty. In the example it will be seen that I worked with a powerful sibling transference for most of the time.

Mr T, a married man, came into therapy in his late forties. He was the middle child of seven. He had three older sisters and three younger brothers. His parents were tenant farmers and he was brought up in the country. He had been advised to seek psychotherapeutic help by his doctor as he seemed irremediably stressed and depressed. He was on Prozac. I saw him three times a week, but he never lay on the couch. “If I can’t see your face, I don’t know what you are doing”, he remarked when we first met, and he continued to fear me, in this way, throughout the therapy. His fear of me was compounded from many things, but I came to formulate his fears in the following way. The seven children were thrown together to bring each other up, while the parents were engaged in maintaining the rigorous demands of their farm. The consequence was that Mr T’s two older sisters were given the task of looking after him. From an early age he remembered being pinched and slapped as they tried to get him dressed in the morning. Meal times were another nightmare, or more accurately, a chaotic free-for-all. When it came to school, again it was his sisters who took him and waited for him at the end. One particularly vivid experience he recounted was walking back from school on a hot summer day. They had a half-mile walk home. He was walking too slowly, his sisters later asserted, and so they ran off without him. He felt lost and completely abandoned, and to this day, the thought of going to a strange place and not being able to find his way still fills him with a visceral dread.

It can be seen that Mr T’s early years came under the powerful influence of his two older sisters, which, in turn, had an effect upon his developing psyche. It was only on rare occasions that he could experience me as a maternal presence that might be available to help him sort through his anxieties. I was even more shadowy as a paternal presence that might be internalized. For the most part, he would come to his sessions, hyperventilating on occasions, in increasing stress. As we tried to unpack the cause of his state of mind, we always got back to his firm conviction that I was one of his sisters, pushing him into the unwelcoming clothes of my psychoanalytic theory and then dismissing him at the end of a session to get lost on his way home. His experience of me was, in some ways, correct, for it was only when I tumbled to the idea that he saw me as one of his older sisters that I realized I had been pushing him into thinking about his difficulties in terms of oedipal and pre-oedipal anxieties. For instance, he suffered extreme anxiety about his sexual fantasies. If they came into his mind he thought that he would be arrested, for he believed they were indelibly written across his brow. In the beginning I tried interpreting his fantasies as expressing oedipal longings to see what I got up to in his absence. When I began to understand that, for the most part, he saw me as one or other of his two older sisters, my understanding of his fantasies changed. He told me that one of the games that his sisters used to play with him was to suddenly pull down his trousers to see if he had an erection. He never knew when they might do this. I could begin to link his terror of his sexually arousing fantasies and this cruel game with his need to keep an eye on me. This led to some important work we did concerning privacy. He needed to find a way in which he could feel that he was able to keep metaphorical hold of his trousers in my presence and not to have to tell me everything that was in his mind. The paradox was that as he felt more able to have a private place for his sexual fantasies, and less obliged to tell me everything, he was able to become more open and feel less vulnerable.

Mr T stayed in therapy for several years and some features of his life changed. He was able to come off Prozac, take early retirement, and develop a passion for cooking. But I was never able to truly assuage the power of Mr T’s older sisters in his internal world. They seemed to be “ineradicably fixed” (Freud, 1900a, p. 483) in his unconscious. This has been my experience with other patients with siblings who have been cruel to them.

To give an example, Mr T developed a passion for cooking. I thought that his cooking was a creative way of dealing with the nightmare meals in his childhood. But, I was never able to share usefully with Mr T, that, wonderful though his cooking seemed to be, his insistence that his wife and children sit for two hours over his carefully prepared meals could be seen as exacting some sort of sadistic revenge upon his sisters. I would try and steer my way around this idea, and the moment he sensed I might see something negative in what he was doing, he would be off into a self-flagellating frame of mind, in which he would tell me that the carrots had been overcooked, there was a lump or two in the potato, and he knew he could never roll the pastry out thinly enough. I was never able to soften this tendency in Mr T to lash out at himself when he sensed I was facing him with his own sadism. He would slip into an experience of himself as an outcast on a desert island in a universe of unjust punishment.

I believe there is a relationship between an unjustly harsh superego and the experience of sibling cruelty. The inner fantasies that terrified Mr T, that he would be exposed and abandoned and his sexual desires would be a cause for humiliation, are fantasies that can be found in many different guises in the inner world of us all. The claim that I am making is that I have become alert to the possibility that an obdurate and harsh superego may be linked to the internalization of siblings as figures of authority. This internalization confronts the psyche with difficulties that need to be distinguished from internalized parental figures. For instance, sibling relationships do not seem to be given up or worked through in the way we have come to expect from the oedipal conflict. I was never able to move the sibling transference into a parental oedipal one, for any length of time with Mr T. The reason for this may be linked to the fact that what becomes internalized are the fantasies that the siblings in authority bring to the relationship. In the case of Mr T, his two older sisters seemed to have had little access to more considerate maternal fantasies. Instead they were probably exhausted and frustrated, angry and cruel, and these feelings fed the landscape of Mr T’s internalized world of care. In Chapter Five I shall be discussing Klein’s view, that the crucial difference between creative sibling relationships and ones that are negative and destructive lie in the nature of the fantasies. Sadistic fantasies that are acted upon between children will be damaging, she suggests.

The experience I have had with Mr T and with Mrs K does not lead me to Freud’s belief that siblings seem to be essentially hostile to each other. In these two cases and one or two others (Coles, 1998), their inner world seemed constructed around the warring forces of sibling hostility and the result was a massive distortion of their capacity to love and be loved. However, it does not follow that all sibling relationships are by their nature hostile. I have also experienced a sibling transference that was highly seductive, compelling, and loving (ibid.). I will only briefly highlight features of the erotic sibling transference.

Mr Y was the oldest of four children, a younger sister and two younger brothers. Mr Y came from a prosperous middle class family that had known none of the economic hardships that Mr T’s family had faced. Mr Y did not have a harsh superego. Nevertheless, he caught me up in a sibling transference that was as powerful as the one with Mr T, though I took time to realize that I had become a much loved, younger sister. In this case I was expected to collude with him in a “secret complicity” (Klein, 1932) against the adults, and indeed I did. I do not mean that I had an affair with himÐ though I do wonder whether therapies that become sexualized may, in some cases, have foundered on an unrecognized sibling transferenceÐbut I was caught up in powerful counter-transference feelings. I would fail to analyse missed sessions when he went off with his girl friend and instead, on one occasion, I overcharged him. I often felt bewildered by what was happening between us, yet he soon became my favourite patient as we seemed to stretch our imagination in sympathetic discourse.

As a young child he and his sister had, one might want to say, fallen in love with each other. I had no reason to believe that it had become a sexualized relationship, but they had become devoted to each other to the exclusion of everyone else. Why had this happened? Were they enacting an oedipal fantasy? Brother and sister against the parents? Their parents were not around much, for they were busy, professional people. All the children had been brought up by a succession of au pair girls and occasional nannies. Mr Y’s relationship with his sister came to be the most stable and reliable one that he knew. My experience with Mr Y made me realize that, at the height of the sibling transference, we seemed to be in an exclusive enclave.

This exclusive enclave, that Mr Y and his sister created, grew, I am sure, from a primary desire to be in a dyadic relationship with the maternal object. My argument is that the relationship of loving cooperation that he had with his sister, altered Mr Y’s inner world. He drew emotional nurturance and support from her and that gave him an experience that he could not have had with a maternal figure. Therefore, we miss something if we say they were just parenting each other, even though the relationship compensated for parental absences. The lived experience made it different, not least because they were almost the same age. It seemed that their relationship helped to nurture in Mr Y a particular sensibility that determined all his subsequent relationships with women, including his therapist. For instance, there was a subtle way in which he could cooperate or even play with an interpretation that I might make. He could, at times, listen to what I had to say from a place within himself that was untrammelled by what might be called oedipal anxieties, such as the fear of seduction or anxieties about my state of mind. These features were not permanent, of course, but they were moments in which we played together cooperatively, like children, and “child’s play” cannot be compared to the games between parents and children. They are different and enrich the psyche in different ways.

These two cases are very extreme. For the most part, my clinical experience suggests that one works with an intermingling and muddle between a sibling transference and a parental one, as in the case of Mrs Z. She was a middle-aged woman married with three children, who came to see me because of panic attacks. As with Mr T, she had an extremely punitive superego, and this alerted me to the possibility of sibling conflicts. I learned that she came from a large family. There were no obvious indications of parental dereliction. In time we came to understand the panic attacks in the following way. Everything that she turned her mind to she needed to do perfectly: perfect mother, perfect patient, perfect secretary, perfect wife. Any lapse from the wished for goal caused an outpouring of self-flagellation which brought on a panic attack. She would panic that she had left a dirty handkerchief in my lavatory, or that she had come to a session at the wrong time, or that she had forgotten to pay me. All of these were run-of-the-mill anxieties about her fear of her negative feelings. But Mrs Z seemed to need to cling to her self-image. I had, by now, become more confident that I could sense the differences between a sibling transference and a parental transference, and the way both could duck in and out of a session. I was able to sense that there were times when her anxiety that she had not paid me could be associated to a fiercely competitive sibling transference in which she wished to be the one receiving the money, not me. At other times the anxiety was more to do with her aggressive fantasies towards me as a maternal figure, with too many babies, and not enough time for her. It was Mrs Z who was able to tell me that she realized she was strung between two incompatible claims. On the one hand, she wanted to have all the attention and the limelight. She wanted her parents’ assurance that they preferred her to her siblings and that they thought her the most beautiful and intelligent. However, the moment that she felt close to achieving some recognition for herself, she knew that it would put her relationship with her siblings into jeopardy. She knew she needed them. She did not know how to straddle the conflict between the wish to be the preferred child and the wish to be part of the sibling clan. I felt that Mrs Z’s incompatible wishes were very real.

One way of conceptualizing Mrs Z’s difficulty might be in terms of Sharpe and Rosenblatt’s (1994) Oedipal Sibling Triangles. They take the view that sibling relationships are “engendered autonomously” (p. 494), and that these relationships develop structurally through a pre-oedipal and dyadic phase to an oedipal triadic phase. In families where there are several siblings, the children will create triangles among themselves that are independent of oedipal parental triangles and these triangles exert a powerful influence upon psychic development. These oedipal sibling triangles can involve two children and one parent or three children. They are not the same as the original oedipal triangle of parents and one child, but they “are sufficiently similar to the standard oedipal triad in dynamics and structural elements” (p. 492).

Sharpe and Rosenblatt (1994) endorse my view that there will be certain characteristics of a sibling transference that will help to distinguish it from a parental one. “A big brother transference will usually entail attitudes of mingled admiration and more openly intense competition” (p. 493). In contrast, a paternal transference, “will usually embody a more ambivalent submission and rebellion” (ibid.). The difficulty of distinguishing between these two ways of relating is that a patient can move very rapidly between them within a session, as I discovered with Mrs Z. For instance, there could be exciting moments with Mrs Z, when I would feel that we had understood something, or made some “progress”, only to discover that this “excitement” involved a “secret complicity” (Klein, 1932) against some authority figure. The excitement could be quickly negated into a sullen rebellion if I was heavy handed with my response.

Some oedipal-like triangles among siblings may be a displacement from parental oedipal issues, as in the case of Mr Y and his sister. It could be said that they were playing “mothers and fathers” against the adult world of absent parents and au pair girls. But as I have already said, the repercussions upon the psyche of taking a sibling as love object alters the inner world in a radical way, and I agree with Sharpe and Rosenblatt (1994) that it “seems to reflect an error common in the psychoanalytic literature” that these subtle dynamics do not become distinguished.

In families where there are several children, sibling oedipal conflict is not only different from parental oedipal conflict, but its resolution is different, and in many cases, more difficult. In particular, the most difficult cases are those that are constellated between two siblings and a parent, and in which it is the parent who is the oedipal rival to the siblings’ relationship. I think this is an important area that needs further exploration and clinical support. In my experience with Mr Y, though it seemed that his mother and caretakers were happy to let the children create a magical world together, it became clear, through my counter-transference enactment when I overcharged him, that I was acting out the role of the jealous mother in rivalry with his girlfriend/sister. I believe that this maternal jealousy helped to reinforce the strength of the sibling tie.

Sharpe and Rosenblatt (1994) refer to another intractable “oedipal sibling triangle” that occurs between two siblings who are in rivalry over a third sibling. In their view, there are several important elements in this constellation that make it more intense than parental oedipal triangles. A child engaged in parental oedipal struggles has two conflicting claims, to be the sole possessor of one parent and at the same time the wish to be loved and taken care of by both parents. With siblings, the dynamics are different. Siblings have easier access to acting out their wishes and desires, whether hostile or loving, and this results in a greater intensity of feeling, which in turn becomes less easy to relinquish. Not only is there less need or desire to overcome oedipal sibling triangles, but the narcissistic blow to the self-esteem that results from the loss of the battle means that there is far greater investment in continuing the battle rather than giving it up, in contrast to parent and child oedipal conflict.

Sharpe and Rosenblatt (1994) illustrate this with the example of a man, Jake, who came from a family of six boys. Jake had become the most successful of the brothers but “he felt anguished and hollow about this victory” (p. 503). One reason for his anguish was that he had competed with his older brother Frank not only for his father’s attention, but also for that of a younger brother, Tommy, to whom Frank was very close. This “sibling triangle” eventually resulted in Jake, Frank, and Tommy all engaging simultaneously in homosexual activity, with Jake vying with Tommy for Frank’s attention. Jake soon withdrew from the meÂnage aÁ trois, but continued to “exploit and verbally abuse Tommy” (ibid.). When later Tommy became “a wasted drug addict” (ibid.), Jake was overwhelmed by guilt. His guilt was more intense and difficult to overcome than his oedipal difficulties with his father.

I discovered Sharpe and Rosenblatt’s work subsequent to therapy with Mr T and Mr Y so I did not pursue with them the idea that they might have been caught up in “oedipal sibling triangles”. I was aware that Mr T seemed stuck in a lonely world of siblings with little recourse to parental help, rather as Tommy in the case above. And in the case of Mr Y, it could be said that he and his sister had created an “oedipal sibling triangle” against the adults and their other siblings. Mrs Z’s anguish, between the wish to be the favoured child of her parents and to be one of the sibling gang, could also be explained as a conflict between two competing oedipal triangles, a parental one and a sibling one.

How can we pick out strong sibling attachments? Are there any fantasies that might be associated with a sibling identification? I have suggested that an extremely harsh superego alerts me to possible sibling conflicts. In such cases, there seems to be an inability to face and deal with their own sadism and cruelty. They live in a world where the chief experience is of martyrdom and masochism. If they are hurt by others, they believe they deserve it. They imagine the solution to their pain is to struggle, yet again, to be perfect. A typical fantasy may be, as with Mr T, that he could create a perfect meal, and when he met any conflict or criticism, he did not have recourse to a soothing internal figure who could love and appreciate his struggle and his creativity. This, as I understand it, is because a cruel sibling has been internalized, who does not have the nurturing capacities that a parental figure more usually possesses. This was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE The sibling transference
• CHAPTER TWO Freud and siblings
• CHAPTER THREE Freud’s early years
• CHAPTER FOUR “The Wolfman”
• CHAPTER FIVE Klein and siblings
• CHAPTER SIX Sibling sexual relationships
• CHAPTER SEVEN Brotherly love
• CHAPTER EIGHT The sibling experience
• CHAPTER NINE Conclusion
• REFERENCES
• INDEX