Chapter 1
Psychoanalytic reflections of sibling experience
Introduction
Little has been written about the place of siblings in the psychoanalytic family, either clinically or conceptually, and even less from a Relational perspective (Grand, 2018). The representation of the sibling register within the transference and countertransference experience, and in our psychic structures at different levels of analysis more broadly, often remains unelaborated. Factoring in the presence of severe disability and difference among siblings narrows the existing pool of literature within the psychoanalytic canon further (Safer, 2002). As psychoanalysts, we are less theoretically primed to think along a lateral relational dimension, barring some notable exceptions (Agger, 1988; Coles, 2003; Balsam, 2013; Bodansky, 2014; Grand, 2018; Kieffer, 2008; Mitchell, 2003, 2013; Orange, 2014; Rosner, 1985; Ruiz, 2012; Safer, 2002; Silverman, 2006; Sullivan, 1954; Vivona, 2010). Attending to events along the lateral relational dimension of developmental life and noticing the implications on psychic functioning, sense of self, and relatedness to others is entering unchartered waters. It can feel as if the ghost of Freud hangs heavy when we start to dream up and imagine relational dimensions of life that may be felt to displace or compete with the centrality of the Oedipal story. But a look into lateral relations need not imply an evasion of our more familiar vertical axis, as these registers interact and infiltrate one another within relational life and unconscious experience (Mitchell, 2003, 2013).
When I turned to the literature to better understand psychoanalytic perspectives on the place of siblings in our inner and outer lives, the epistemological orientation from which the papers were written did not resonate with the experience of being a survivor sibling. In this chapter, I will summarize the theoretical perspectives I encountered in the search and then go on to introduce the clinical concepts I find most resonant in making sense of sibling survivorship. Influenced by the trauma literature on dissociative disorders, the neuroscience of attachment, and the exploratory clinical acumen of a contemporary relational psychoanalytic practice, I consider how the dissociation and assimilation of ambiguous loss affect the survivor sibling within the family system and later in their vocational practice (Boss, 1999; Bromberg, 1998; Siegel, 1999; Van Der Hart et al., 2006). The impact of survivorship results in a plethora of what I call unexperienced-experience with developmental sequelae that call for a revisionary and nuanced understanding of the clinical process. I hope to generate psychoanalytic thinking about the importance of attending to trauma along the lateral relational dimension, as well as enhance clinicians’ capacities for mutual recognition of a register that often remains unformulated within our field (Stern, 1983).
Relational perspectives on theory building
The Relational turn in psychoanalysis altered the epistemological context in which psychoanalytic theory is made. We are no longer inclined to create grand theory and generalize developmental or clinical findings into linear, stage-driven, positivistic structures with discrete categorizations of health and its absence. Health and subjectivity exist more along a continuum of loosely constrained but affiliated dialectical tensions (Mitchell, 1988; Mitchell & Aron, 1999; Ogden, 1989). A relational sensibility does not valorize unconscious content, as if it can only be gleamed from dreams or our patient’s “free” associations (Mitchell, 1988). Freed up from interpreting everything through a drive-derivative lens, we no longer split primitive from non-primitive defenses along pejorative lines regarding “analyzability.” Nor do we pre-suppose a unitary subject, as the notion of a singular (sense of) self is replaced with a non-unitary structure that contains a multiplicity of self/other configurations which, taken together, come to feel like “me” (Bromberg, 1993).
One way I identify a Relational sensibility is one that bypasses dichotomous thinking, welcoming instead contradiction and paradox (Pizer, 1992). Transcending polarities invites a deep dive into the unique encounter as it occurs both within (object relations) and between people (interpersonal relations) and their psyches/somas (Aron, 1991; Mitchell, 1988; Ogden, 1994). The experience itself contains all polarities and dualities simultaneously (“good”/“bad”/“neutral,” conscious/unconscious, doer/done to, fantasized/experienced, etc.) whether or not a person has the capacity to attend to every dimension (Benjamin, 2004). We now thankfully take for granted that the observed is necessarily impacted by the observer and vice versa in a continuous bidirectional fashion (Hoffman, 1991).
This does not leave us without any options for theorizing, though centering human subjectivity and its vicissitudes in relation to various dyads/triads/societal/cultural domains and levels of consciousness make it impossible to say something that is generalizable to all. Instead, our attention shifts to how environments (intra- and inter-) create and curtail potentialities for growth and change within and between people. Relational approaches incidentally generate theory specifying these optimal intra- and inter-relational conditions on the basis of the lived experience between people, most importantly including how the interpersonal field allows for and constrains such change and movement. It lets go of the illusion that “the well” are categorically different from “the sick,” and distills developmental experience as something that is accessible within the clinical moment between two people, as opposed to an archeological dig into the past through the one-way street of a patient’s verbally represented unconscious (Levenson, 2009). It makes use of all dimensions of time – past, present, and future – and ignites and enlists imagination as a powerful source of healing. In the words of Emmanuel Ghent (1992), “Relational theorists tend to share a view in which both reality and fantasy, both outer world and inner world, both the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, play immensely important and interactive roles in human life” (p. xvii). In short, it unsettles what was once considered psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1988). I share this paradigm shift to orient the reader to my experience. When I set out to examine the existing literature on siblings and siblingship within the psychoanalytic canon, I mostly encountered data obtained from a pre-Relational one-person perspective, where the author(s) offered broadly assumed generalizable observations about the unconscious role of siblings in a patient’s psychic life, absent an appreciation for the bidirectional field in which these observations were cast. The information gathered from this vantage point felt quite limiting in studying survivor siblings, most of all because they are not represented. These earlier papers assume evenness in capacities among children and focus on the intrapsychic consequences of jealousy, rivalry, and aggression as they are expressed in the inner object world through the transference. A more nuanced understanding of what a survivor sibling may feel vis-à-vis their disabled sibling, including these internalized object representations as well as the “real” relationship, is eclipsed. Despite these limitations, I think it’s important to cover the tracks that were laid before I offer other ways of engaging the sibling dimension. But I want to caution the reader that to look at the impact of severely disabled siblings on survivor siblings does not necessitate and actually cannot result in a new grand theory or complex. A Relational perspective is not a theory but a sensibility (Mitchell & Aron, 1999). And it sensitizes us to context and the complex, unpredictable, but always ongoing relationship between permeable boundaried levels of unconscious and conscious experience within and between selves. My goal is not to set forth a diagnostic category of survivor siblings but to apply careful attention to the experience of survivorship in this lateral context, as it is relayed to me. I hope to leave readers with a strong affective impression and many more questions, rather than a diagnostic category itself. But first, let’s see what some elder analytic author siblings had to say on the matter.
History speaks through relationship
In researching this book, I came across the autobiographical fact that both Freud and Ferenczi experienced the death of younger siblings during their early years (Berman, 2004). Perhaps that’s not so unusual given the rate of infant mortality for their time. But given how foundational their impassioned and strenuous relationship to one another has been to our discipline, I found it really interesting to consider how their differing reactions to this shared autobiographical experience contributed to their theoretical stances. Whereas Freud focused on the competitive strivings between siblings for parental attention, Berman makes the case that Ferenczi went in the direction of a co-conspirator and collaborator. Berman’s close reading of the correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi delineates the latter’s openness to inhabiting lateral relations within the transference and countertransference field, alongside the more familiar hierarchal relations. Freud, it seemed, was aligned with authority; Ferenczi, with his peers. Berman (2004) suggests that in Ferenczi’s exploration of “mutual analysis”:
Ferenczi shifted his central therapeutic image from mothers and children to brothers and sisters. Parents are out of the picture, Analyst and analysand are now Hansel and Gretel, seeking hand in hand their lost path in a dark forest populated by abusive witches.
(p. 50)
Contemporary (re)discoveries of Ferenczi’s thinking and clinical practice reveal his creativity in using his own vulnerability as a guide (Dupont, 1988; Ferenczi, 1988). A less hierarchical and more lateral relatedness were experimented with on the basis of felt clinical necessity. Importantly, this was tied to his capacity to appreciate how trauma shaped and warped human identity, making him sensitive to the registers of power between patient and analyst/child/parent, all the while living this traumatic love relationship out with Freud (Ferenczi, 1949). It seems that Ferenczi opened the door to a psychoanalytic appreciation of lateral relations. It is beyond the scope of this book to offer a full summary of this psychoanalytic history, but I want to note that Ferenczi’s contributions included a path toward lateral relatedness that was dislocated in time as the relationship between him and Freud ultimately orphaned Ferenczi’s clinical legacy from the generations of analysts that came after him (Harris & Kuchuck, 2014). Perhaps Freud’s commitment from 1900 onward to the Oedipus complex as the defining feature of family life constrained our psychoanalytic imaginations, even as it broke new ground in demonstrating the power of unconscious phenomena in the parent/child relationship.
“One Person” instinctually driven views on siblings
The resulting hegemonic loyalty to Freud necessitated analytic attention on Oedipal strivings and object relations built up around these vertical power relations. An instinctual view of unconscious life is guided by the belief that internal objects interface with drive derivatives through fantasy, creating character structure, and shaping the course development. Siblings become powerful objects of rivalry and contrast, yielding an unconscious effect on identity formation through competition and comparison. Lateral relations offer the unconscious a playground in which to try on various identifications/counter-identifications under less psychic threat than may be felt with parents (Charles, 1999; Rosner, 1985). Charles (1999) asserts that taking these risks is less threatening internally than engaging in these struggles with authority figures.
Juliet Mitchell (2003, 2013), the premiere psychoanalytic sibling theorist who disrupts the centrality placed on the Oedipal drama, puts forth a universal theory of sibling’s unconscious psychic trauma of displacement. The feared displacement a new baby ignites in a sibling is thought to accompany intense feelings of love and hatred that can easily overwhelm a not matured ego. Mitchell highlights the mutative affect of the mother’s role in “seriality,” sending the unconscious communication of there being room for more than one child in her heart. Absent seriality, these traumatic unconscious affects remain potent. Vivona (2010) applies this larger theoretical formulation to her clinical work with a patient who utilizes the transference to move back and forth through sibling-to-sibling and parent-to-child relations in establishing a unique identity of her own. Vivona describes inherent difficulties as the patient works to transform feelings of hatred and eroticism toward a sibling into a matured identity of her own (Vivona, 2010). With a Kleinian flavor, the task of integrating opposing feelings toward the object is thought to enhance one’s own identity/psychic maturity. Vivona does not explicitly use her countertransference in the work, but she does draw our attention to the sibling dimension as the patient encounters it. Balsam (2013) also offers an in-depth clinical account and describes how difficulties in creativity tied to static sibling relationships with an undifferentiated mother can wreak psychic havoc.
In an effort to legitimize the place and consideration of siblings in our unconscious l...
