ABSTRACT
The enrichment of the world of play and the whole life of the imagination when a child acquires a sibling is almost impossible to overestimate. Developmental psychology has devoted much research over the last decades to this phase of childhood. The coinage "middle childhood" roughly corresponds to the developmental period in psychoanalysis termed "latency", so-called because it is held that early childhood oedipal struggles and turmoils have died down, or been for the time resolved, before their resurgence at puberty/adolescence. Parental favouritism is currently a "hot" topic on the web, with dozens of sites devoted, for example, to parental guidance as well as to personal accounts and famous historic cases. It has not been a subject for recent publications in psychoanalytic literature where work on siblings has been gradually gaining steam, but it may be an area for future research.
