ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a theme which is the effect of an unremembered dead sibling upon subsequent generations. It explores the clinical case of a middle-aged woman, Muriel. The transference experience with Muriel revealed an uneasy relation with her mother that in turn reflected her mother’s early history. In spite of all the historic knowledge about the traumas that had beset Muriel’s family, the therapy was lifeless and dead. A new and enormously important shift in the therapy followed the sibling transference. Understanding something of the complexity of this unconscious fantasy, she came to see that she had been held in a deathly embrace of unacknowledged grief and rage, occasioned by two world wars that had stretched back at least three generations on both sides of her family. Finally, she felt less angry with her paternal grandparents for their idealisation of their “heroic” son.
