ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the issues through the connecting theme of siblings and murder, but from several different sets of circumstances. Siblings cannot resolve their ambivalent feelings towards their sister, and instead their impossible love – hate way of relating results in switching constantly between murderous rivalry and identification with the sibling. The hate and love of the sibling who wants simultaneously to annihilate and have a replica-twin in the “murder as phantasy” group of patients can be distinguished under the guise of opposing pulls towards revenge and self-sacrifice in those of the “murder as fact” group. The chapter explains the observation of some transformations that take place in the fragile psyche when a powerful phantasy of murder of the hated and loved sibling has become a reality. For the “murder as phantasy” patients, there was a need to face the fact of a living sibling in order to allow a healthy dependence to develop.
