I came across siblings really by surprise. I had been studying hysteria,
both as a clinician - I'm a psychoanalyst and I'd been working clinically with patients -
and, because I was asked by a publisher to write a book on hysteria.
And there was something that just wasn't explained for me and the whole topic, both
in a clinical situation and in the theoretical work. I'd read lots of history, lots of literature, as well as
psychology and in the field,
anthropology - a whole lot around hysteria, masses
for an unconscionable number of years.
And then one day I thought, I'm either going to give up this book or
I'm just going to write it and we'll see.
And I started
and suddenly
what's in my field, which is psychoanalysis,
the central thing is the Oedipus complex, like a big rock
in the middle of the theory.
And suddenly this rock sort of shifted slightly and there were these dancing, squabbling children
behind it and I thought,
oh wait a minute, what are they doing?
And I went back and read not only my own
notes from clinical cases but all the classical clinical cases, all the
anthropological studies and historical studies, and siblings were just everywhere.
I would say in my own field there isn't a case history in which
the birth of a sibling, and I'm saying the birth of the next sibling after you,
isn't a major event, which triggers
some sort of dramatic reaction
and from that I moved on to looking at siblings of course,
and siblings became a feature of the book.
I got extremely interested and read all the sibling literature. There was
some work in developmental psychology, which was good and interesting.
Anthropology had a place for it, but not much observation and so on and so forth.
And I actually did another training myself in group psychoanalysis because
I started to realise that of course what happens with a sibling
is the beginning of social life.
You've got
a baby up to the sort of toddler age when it's beginning to walk and talk.
Really,
of course it's in a social world. It's never not social. It's never asocial but it doesn't
really see itself is part of a social world
until another sibling comes along or should come along, so
I think it applies to only children just as much as sibling children because
only children have siblings in their fantasies and their minds
even more than
people who have actual siblings. So
It applies to everybody that siblings are crucially important.
I say that for me there are two key
statements to be made out of an enormous field.
One is what I call the sibling trauma
and that is, there you are going along as a toddler,
expecting to be
the king of the world. Freud calls it 'his majesty the baby',
and along comes somebody and you're told, Oh, you're going to have a baby sister or brother.
Won't that be lovely?
And you think, oh yes,
baby, that's more me. It comes along
and far from it being more you, it's instead of you, so to speak, and so
it's traumatic because what has been
your very
magisterial ego that's just emerging really as a big thing
gets shattered.
And it has to be rebuilt,
as not the baby,
but as the child, and the child is the first social person in itself because
once you know that
there's somebody else there,
you're not alone in the world. There are others. It yourself and others that you're looking at.
It's a subject and relation to others
that you're getting with the siblings.
And that's the first time it becomes really meaningful that you're a girl or a boy because
you're a girl or a boy in relation to a baby who is,
yes, a girl or a boy, of course, but really more baby than girl or boy, so
it's that shattered ego, the sibling trauma, the rebuilding of the toddler's ego from
of the toddler's ego from being the baby as a self to being
a social person,
boy or girl,
relating to others in the world, and then we move on the whole social dimension
of what I call a social ego.
And so it's a very big topic indeed.
And that's really,
when studying groups, it's because I was interested, having trained as an individual psychoanalyst,
and also as a literary critic, I'd been interested in the individual in a sense,
and theoretically, hypothetically in the social,
I needed to be able to work
clinically as well as and think clinically
in group formations.
And this is all part of a series that we're running from the psychoanalytic unit
within clinical psychology in University College as well as
as a series of public lectures,
which we're running every term, a public,
interdisciplinary
lecture on a particular topic. And last term we did dreams,
a psychoanalyst, an anthropologist and an art historian.
This term we've done siblings and psychoanalysis
because it's psychoanalysis and
other disciplines because
lots of other disciplines use psychoanalysis, not just used in the clinic.
It's used in a lot of other disciplines.