ABSTRACT
Siblings smile at each other more, intuitively pick up the feelings of the other sibling more quickly, and when they are separated they can experience intense feelings of loss. J. Mitchell’s belief is that sibling identification is a distorting mirror. The chapter suggests that a therapy may founder on undiagnosed sibling transference, like a marriage that is breaking down over a nursery quarrel. A marriage that is foundering on a nursery quarrel may prove to be more difficult to resolve, for there is more narcissistic humiliation involved in relinquishing a sibling battle. To encounter the raw passions of the nursery within a therapy can be an alarming experience. One way of conceptualizing sibling/peer identification might be to say it gives rise to or strengthens a “we” ego. The case of G. G. Byron and his half-sister, Augusta, and the intuitive insights of such writers as A. S. Byatt and H. Dunmore, would seem to confirm this point of view.
