Siblings in development: towards a metapsychology

Juliet Mitchell explained her particular angle and interest in siblings. In particular, she did not get to her ideas about siblings through siblings per se, either through an interesting case of sibling transference, or a sibling relationship pre-eminent in a patient's inner world. JM suggested that having a sibling is a very necessary catastrophe. In terms of the question as to where the sibling nexus is situated between the mother and Oedipus, it is the group that this sibling nexus goes into. The brotherhood is a familiar phrase and the sisterhood is familiar particularly since the feminist movement. In response to a question from the floor regarding the role of envy in a relationship with siblings, JM spoke about the three terms: rivalry, jealousy, and envy. Envy has had a lot of attention with Klein and in relation to the mother. Rivalry is what we normativized in sibling relationships. Jealousy is the concept we have left out.