Psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell on Siblings in Psychoanalysis

How do our siblings affect the development of our egos and how do our early experiences with or without brothers and sisters map out our sense of self?

In this mini-lecture Professor Juliet Mitchell (UCL Psychoanalysis Unit) discusses her research into siblings and tells us more about how our siblings shape our development.

Freud’s Oedipus complex focuses on the centrality of the parental objects in the child’s psychic development. In The Interpretation of Dreams he wrote “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father”. It seems that because of this emphasis on a vertical diachronic axis of generations not enough attention has been paid to the effect of sibling relationships in the development of the psychic structure.

Juliet Mitchell in her work urged analysts to pay more attention to the place of siblings in the subject’s psychic economy and their impact on the psychic structure. The trauma of a sibling’s birth leads the child to question its very existence and to the murderous desire to eliminate the usurper. But the baby being an alter ego also loved by the mother, the challenge is to overcome the violence and accept its sibling as like itself but not identical to itself. This leaves room for more than one person to be the mother’s child and introduces the concept of seriality.

Juliet Mitchell coined the phrase the ‘Law of the Mother’ for the prohibitions against sibling murder and sibling incest. In a direct reference to Lacan’s ‘Law of the Father’ this concept represents a theoretical challenge. If the Law is seen has a generalisation of the symbolic acceptance of the prohibition of incest, arrived at through a metaphoric process in which the name of the father replaces the object of the mother’s desire, is the Law of the Mother a different type of Law ? Lionel Bailly will argue that the process by which sibling murder and incest is prohibited is similar but different to that of the Law of the Father and does not lead to the establishment of a Law but of a Covenant arrived at through a metonymic process which symbolically disguise the real threat: the loss of maternal love. The importance of an understanding of the lateral axis in psychoanalysis is not only theoretical but also practical. The analytic treatment needs to take into account this dimension and this conference will provide an opportunity to examine and discuss clinical cases in which the siblings play a central role.

Selected Books by Juliet Mitchell

• Siblings: Sex and Violence

• Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne

• Mad Men And Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria

Siblings: Sex and Violence

Buy Siblings: Sex and Violence here.

Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which we might understand them. In the Western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or ascent: mother or father to child, or child to parent. Yet our ideals are ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ or the ‘sisterhood’ of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of ‘fratricide’.

When we grow up, siblings feature prominently in sex, violence and the construction of gender differences but they are absent from our theories. This book examines the reasons for this omission and begins the search for a new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships.

This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to a wide general readership.

Siblings in the Unconscious and Psychopathology: Womb Fantasies, Claustrophobias, Fear of Pregnancy, Murderous Rage, Animal Symbolism, Christmas and Easter "Neuroses", and Twinnings or Identifications with Sisters and Brothers

Buy Siblings in the Unconscious and Psychopathology here.

This book examines adults’ identifications and internal relationships with their siblings’ mental representations. The authors believe that the best way to illustrate clinical formulations and psychoanalytic theoretical concepts is to provide detailed clinical data. The influence of childhood sibling experiences and associated unconscious fantasies, in their own right, in adults’ personality characteristics, behaviour patterns, and symptoms are presented from seventeen case reports. Clinicians who have patients with fear of pregnancy, claustrophobia, incestuous fantasies, extreme dependency on or murderous rage against siblings, guilt due to the death of a sister or brother in childhood, replacement child syndrome, history of adoption, certain types of animal phobias and related issues will find this volume most helpful. The authors have made a rare, but needed, psychoanalytic contribution that examines mental representations of sisters and brothers in our daily lives.