ABSTRACT
The place that siblings have in Anna Freud’s work is as competitors for parental attention. Freud has been credited, quite rightly, with having normalized sibling rivalry. Freud’s view, that the essential nature of sibling relationships is one of jealousy, is supported by the Judaeo±Christian culture of the Old Testament, which is redolent with sibling murder and rivalry. The more difficult question is whether siblings can love each other. The way Freud formulates sibling relationships suggests that sibling love and cooperation are always a form of expediency, and such a view leads to scepticism about a deeply held cultural belief in brotherly love. Freud, like George Eliot, had an intuitive appreciation of the emotional impact of sibling relationships, and yet his theoretical beliefs led him to reject the idea that sibling relationships could form a part of the structure of the psyche.
