On Siblings

and the writings of Juliet Mitchell

“Wherever there are siblings, there is murder in the air” - Juliet Mitchell

There is the idea in psychoanalysis, dating back to Freud, that normative childhood development is traumatic. First, as Melanie Klein explained, there is the trauma of the baby realizing mom is separate from the self. After the baby hopefully mourns this inconvenient fact (and integrates it into their psyche), they have to deal with the trauma of wanting an exclusive love relationship with the opposite sex parent (evoking terrible anxiety, as this wish means the other parent needs to be disappeared, but the child desperately loves the other parent, as well. What a bind!)

Psychoanalysis: this whole being human thing, and growing up? Brutal.

Eight years ago, as a new mom armed with cursory knowledge of Winnicott and Klein, the dramas of infancy, while often exhausting and overwhelming, did not surprise me. Similarly, as Oedipal dynamics have emerged in both of my daughters in relation to me and my husband, I have felt almost delighted to witness how obvious and banal it all is. How many times I’ve said to myself “so Freud really was right all along” as my youngest cries about wanting to marry her dad, or my oldest tries, literally, to push dad and mom apart from an embrace.

The drama of siblings, however, brought me to my knees. I wasn’t completely oblivious to sibling dynamics before becoming a mother, of course. I thought I knew what to expect. There will be some jealousy, some rivalry. Our attention, as parents, will now be divided. I read Alfred Adler in undergrad. This will be cause for some tough moments, I thought. But the idea that the birth of a new sibling, much like other normative childhood experiences, would be traumatic? Well, for some reason(s), which I’m sure have names (*cough cough* repression, denial, reaction formation), that, I did not anticipate.

Which makes me feel a bit of embarrassment, as I am quite aware of my own sibling trauma. I grew up with an older brother who suffered from Bipolar and died by suicide when I was 19. I had spent a lot of time in my own therapy figuring out how to mourn and ultimately accept this profound loss. But alas, isn’t it often the very thing that has impacted us most, that we tend to be blind to, in its new and novel iterations?

My naivety was exposed when we brought our youngest home from the hospital. Within the first 48 hours, it became clear that our oldest was in a state of anguish. She wailed like a widow in mourning when I would go to breastfeed the baby. Within the first week, she took to dropping herself on the floor and pretending she couldn’t walk, usually right when the baby had started crying and needed tending to.

“Arrival of a sibling is experienced as death of the self.” - Juliet Mitchell (Siblings, p. 29)

As the weeks wore on, our oldest started to verbalize, in a rather humorous and thinly veiled manner, her murderous urges. Every few days, she would say, with a calm curiosity: “What if we left the baby on a volcano?”

I felt, suddenly, placed into the terrible role of a perpetrator of harm. After all, it was I who grew and birthed this baby! This delightful baby I was falling in love with, just as I had fallen in love with my eldest when she was a newborn. The fact that by loving another, I was betraying my eldest, was acutely painful. I could see her look at me sometimes, usually when I was breastfeeding her sister, with a look of pure hatred and despair. She had been displaced.

As the baby grew into a toddler, my eldest started to adjust. There were moments of delight. The fact that my eldest could make her younger sister laugh like no one else became a source of great pride for her.

And now? They are best friends and enemies all at once. Playmates and adversaries. Currently on Christmas break, their lazy days together include many laughs, imaginative games played for hours, intermingled with cat fights and tears. The youngest has had to face her own trauma from day one: knowing, on some level, that her sister would like to….leave her on a volcano. Luckily, she seems to have been born with a resilient temperament, and defends herself well. Or maybe this is the selfish thing I tell myself, to assuage my guilt for creating, with my spouse, this whole murderous drama.

Before I discovered the writings of Juliet Mitchell, I would often scoff at the internal monologue I was having about my children and their rivalry. I kept going back, in my mind, to the word trauma. It truly felt like my eldest experienced the birth of her sibling as traumatic. “So everyone with a sibling is traumatized? Oh, come on, Catherine, don’t be ridiculous. You are biased here because you have suffered the severe mental illness and death of a sibling. Trauma and sibling are conflated, for you.” But, I couldn’t shake it.

So imagine my delight, relief, and grief when I discovered that there was, in fact, writing on the topic of sibling trauma, and the universality of it. Psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, in her book Siblings (along with other writings) describes a neglected topic in psychoanalytic literature: that the birth of a sibling is universally traumatic for the eldest, and that the youngest is then traumatized by noticing someone wants them murdered, and that this whole experience, what she calls the lateral axis of development, is repressed. Much like the vertical axis of the Oedipal complex, this repression means it shows up in all sorts of ways in adulthood.

And as for the parent, as perpetrator of harm? Indeed. Mitchell proposes “The Law of the Mother” as a universal principle young children internalize in relation to their mother and siblings: that is, the mother will not allow the child to murder the baby. The mother will not allow the siblings to annihilate one other. This is experienced as traumatic, because the eldest child now Knows, often for the first time, that mother’s love is, in fact, conditional. Throw the baby off a cliff and mother’s love may really be withdrawn, in a very real way.

How we mourn, integrate, or do not, the existence and threat of our siblings, leaves an indelible mark. If mourned and integrated sufficiently, murderous impulses can be sublimated into competition and emulation. We can admire, love, and healthily compete against our peers. And what about unresolved sibling hatred? Mitchell posits this shows up individually as issues with destructive envy towards our peers, and in the collective, may be responsible for wars: world wars, gender wars, workplace wars. After all, our “siblings” become our peers, which become our coworkers, friends, classmates, lovers..and enemies.

As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Juliet Mitchell’s writings also resonated for me clinically. Over the years, I’ve been struck by what a large, looming role siblings have held in the psyche of many patients. This shows up in myriad ways, of course. The mix of love and hate towards one’s siblings, in my clinical experience, can cause great distress for certain patients. If a patient is more successful than a sibling, there is often guilt. Did their developmentally normal hatred cause harm to their brother or sister? Are they somehow responsible for their sibling’s troubles?

If a patient is the troubled one, or neglected or scapegoated, in the family, there is often very painful envy and hatred towards the preferred siblings, or the siblings who seem to “have it all together.” One might never, really, get over the sense of being displaced. Seeing one’s parents beam with pride over a brother or sister may always evoke a felt sense of being last year’s favorite toy.

Workplace troubles, feeling left out in friend groups, a pattern of unhelpful competitiveness towards dating partners. Sibling trauma can haunt us.

Melanie Klein wrote about envy transforming into gratitude as a person realizes they actually got enough. Ideally, normal sibling hatred lessens as we enter adulthood. As we realize that our parents, did, in fact, love us and give us what we needed, even as there were other hungry mouths to feed, or another’s tantrums to soothe.

Of course, some children really did not get enough: attention, love, care, regard. Some siblings are truly preferred, as parental projections can cast children into roles of Good and Bad. Unresolved conflicts within a parent can find a convenient external dumping ground in their children, heightening and prolonging sibling trauma and rivalry. These siblings are often the patients we see in therapy. The adult children whose parents did not know how to, or could not, provide a safe and sturdy enough environment for sibling rivalries to be played out and adequately resolved.

Sibling dynamics can show up in interesting ways in the transference, of course. There is the anguish of realizing the therapist (mother or father) has other children (patients) and the subsequent felt hatred towards the “competition.” I’ve found there is often a desire for patients to be the preferred sibling, in some way. The wish to know that they are, in fact, special, and not just another “mouth to feed.”

But perhaps less talked about in psychoanalytic literature is sibling transference. A patient who is around the same age may unconsciously see us as their rival. I wonder if this is sometimes confused as vertical/Oedipal, when really it’s a reliving of something on the lateral axis.

In the end, as with most developmental phenomena, we are perhaps left to sit with something unresolved. I may always, unconsciously, fear that I murdered my brother. There were moments I wanted him gone, after all, when I was little. And now he is gone, forever. As a mother, I will have to live with not knowing how my own children’s rivalry, hatred and love for one another will be integrated. Will they always be good friends? Will they comfort one another when we, their parents, are gone?

How tempting it is to try and grasp for some illusion of control, for a way to tame the psyche and reign in its unruly desires.