Musings about Siblings

A friend once confided that his father and his father's brother never talk to each other.  I assumed he meant they had a temporary falling out, but as he added more detail the period involved was some 15 years. Another friend has a sister who's been out of touch with everyone in her family for as long as she can remember and acknowledges she may never see her for the rest of her life.  And still another friend has a brother she typically describes as never being there for her, whatever the "there" is.  It's the other sibling's fault, he or she did it, I'm innocent, parents often hear from their young children, typical and often amusing comments from a 5 year-old or maybe even an 8 year-old.  But what does it mean when those young children are in their 40s or 50s and essentially say the same things?

Undoubtedly all these splittings have different causes, but the apparent trauma connected to each broken relationship is impressive.  Absent sexual abuse and extreme bullying, which I discounted, how could things have gotten so bad?  If problems with siblings can't be worked out how will that carry over into the world and affect relationships with spouses, lovers and friends, even with foreign nations? Totally, some, not at all?  And is it that the love or the hatred is too deep; or perhaps both?    

Dream Clutter

I've read the opinion that Freud's work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," may have been his most influential.  In that book he emphasized how dreams are stimulated from what might appear to be relatively insignificant occurrences of the day.  I'm often impressed by how these occurrences express themselves, symbolically and usually visually, in the actual or manifest content of a dream.

For example, yesterday I received a short e-mail from a local library indicating that their fall calender was full and wouldn't be able to hold a reading for the poetry book my sister and I will be publishing this coming October.  The e-mail also indicated I might try to again schedule the reading at the beginning of 2014.  In a relatively long dream that night, toward the end I found myself competing in a tennis match with one of my former tennis partners.  I won the first point, but when I moved to the ad-court for the second I found it cluttered with all sorts of junk that prevented us from continuing to play.  The junk included several bookshelves, which, to me, was a reference to the e-mail about our poetry book, a kind-of putting off of the poetry game.   

Recommended reading: Juliet Mitchell's "Sibling"

I just finished reading Juliet Mitchell's "Sibling", a psychoanalytic work on the importance of siblings relationships. I would highly recommend it. Mitchell focuses on horizontal relationships rather than the parental ones most often the subject of psychoanalytic evaluation. She posits that the most important cause of hysteria is the displacement by the younger sibling of the older as the parents' focus of attention.