Siblings in Therapy: Life Span and Clinical Issues

Brothers and sisters powerfully influence one another's personality development, social adaptation, emotional vitality, family experience, and life choices in love and work.

This book marks psychotherapy's long overdue recognition of the importance of sibling relationships. The contributors, all experienced psychotherapists, trace the sibling bond through the life span, covering an array of normative and clinical issues.

The first section covers Sibling Dynamics: General Issues: here contributors look at intense sibling relationships, effects of birth order and family structure, and ethnic issues.

Section II, entitled When Siblings Are Close: The Early Years, covers such issues as the sibling dynamics in large families, divorcing and remarried families, and alcoholic families, as well as treatment of brother-sister incest and with siblings of disabled children.

Moving into adolescence and young adulthood in Section III, Balancing Closeness and Separateness, clinicians share their experiences of working with symptoms as sibling messages, recognizing the special dynamics in families where the siblings are all of one gender, and supporting the sibling relationship in eating-disordered families and in families where one sibling has a chronic mental illness.

In Section IV, Settling Old Scores: The Middle Years, we are reminded that childhood siblings conflicts can haunt adult relationships. In addition, chapters examine sibling dynamics in family businesses and :sibling" issues among cotherapists and coauthors.

A sibling is often an individual's most enduring intimate contact, as the sibling relationship may last longer than those with parents, spouses, and children. Section V, Facing the Problems of Aging: The Late Years, explores relationships among adult siblings who care for their aged parents and among elderly siblings.

Brothers and sisters powerfully influence one another's personality development, social adaptation, emotional vitality, family experience and life choices in love and work. This book marks psychotherapy's long overdue recognition of the importance of sibling relationships.