ABSTRACT
According to Bank and Kahn (1980-1981), who studied Freud’s writings on siblings, Hans, as an older child, was not improved by having a younger child to whom he might be a teacher. Hannah simply threatened his monopoly over his parents’ love. In this case, ‘the sibling relationship has no separate life of its own’ (p. 496). In terms of the Wolf Man, Bank and Kahn point out how the Wolf Man’s older sister, Anna, made him feel inferior. Freud (1918) describes the Wolf Man’s relationship to his sister as having triggered his phobia of wolves by frightening him with wolves in picture books, as well as seducing him sadistically, and rebuffing his sexual advances. In Freud’s ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913), Bank and Kahn point out that the brothers seem to have a bond only because they are working out their Oedipal guilt together, assassinating and eating their tyrannical father. These writers go on to discuss Freud’s own experience as a brother, which, they state, was negative: he felt guilty about the death of his younger brother, Julius; he felt dominated by his step-brother’s son, Philip; and he actively disliked his sister, Anna, who was closest to him in age.
