Enactments of Sibling Relationships in a Group

Taken from a panel presentation “Imagination and Hope in Relational and Group Analytic Perspectives” at the annual conference of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), “Imagining with Eyes Wide Open: Relational Journeys” in Tel Aviv, June 2019

Relational theory and group analysis both underscore the hope of treatment within a relationship. The shift in analytic relationships from hierarchical to mutual has led, in my view, to an increasing interest in the place of siblings in psychoanalysis. As a psychoanalyst and group analyst, I find that in general, a group is the appropriate setting for dealing with these relationships.

In their relationship with others, people reenact what they experienced not only in their parent-child relationship but also in their original relationships with siblings. Whereas the dyadic analytic relationship tends to bring out parent-child transference, the transference relationships in group analysis are familial ones, i.e., horizontal.

Siblings are always represented in the mind, whether they exist in reality or not. Therefore, just as an infant expects there to be a mother and father, so will the infant expect there to be a sibling. Similarly, parental representations exist in the inner world of the child as do sibling representations. These internal siblings are also expressed in transference relationships in psychoanalytic work.

In her theories of sibling trauma and the law of the mother (2003, 2006, 2018), Juliet Mitchell suggests a horizontal axis of lateral social relationships among siblings. She argues that for everyone, the arrival of a sibling, or the last or only child’s expectation of such an arrival, constitutes a traumatic annihilation of the one-and-only being that the toddler has been up to now. The mother then prohibits the toddler from getting rid of (murdering) the baby or from considering the baby and itself as one and the same (i.e., incest). The mother threatens that if her prohibition is disobeyed, she will not love, care for, or protect the toddler. Such a threat for the still highly dependent toddler is a further trauma, somewhat along the lines of the later castration threat to the oedipal child.

Sibling trauma and the law of the mother are reflected in the group-analytic group. The group offers the possibility of many sibling transference relationships and is a place in which the interaction among the members, i.e., the group matrix, facilitates reenactment of original sibling trauma. Thus, the group provides an opportunity to relive the past in the present and fulfill one’s need to go back in order to remember. Reenactment of sibling trauma in a group setting makes change and growth possible. Grossmark (2007) assumes that all behavior in the group is a form of communication of the members’ inner worlds and unarticulated experience. The group can reach this level of understanding only if the conductor permits the full enactment of these inner worlds within the group.

Many patients come to analysis with despair and social hopelessness that are partly due to an inability to imagine change and hope in the reenactment of initial sibling relationships. During the various enactments in an analytic group, patients have the opportunity to imagine, to hope, and to practice new experiences and new relationships with spouses, friends, and colleagues.

The group that I am presenting today consisted of six participants: three men and three women. Over the years, sibling relationships were very dominant, and the processes that the group members underwent were meaningful. This presentation describes an enactment that took place between two patients and the involvement of the group and of me as facilitator throughout the process.

When Aviv joined the group, he immediately felt threatened by a male member who had joined before him. Aviv experienced this man as the elder brother who had come into the world before him, taking what Aviv believed should have been his place. Striving to demonstrate his uniqueness, Aviv projected all the unwanted parts of himself onto that member. Every time a new male joined the group, Aviv took it very hard. An analysis of his reactions suggests that Aviv was constantly reliving the difficult relationship with his real brother. The latter would always win in contests between them. Aviv told the group that he accepted the fact that his brother had been born before him and was stronger than he was, but as he grew older he realized that his difficulty lies in this connection.  The experience that he is inferior to others accompanies him everywhere, and the pattern of feeling left behind continued outside the family. Aviv always viewed those around him as better off.

Over the years, Aviv opened up more to the group, sharing childhood traumas that were connected to sadistic relationships with his siblings and friends. Exhibiting a great deal of shame, he told the group about sadistic acts that he had performed when he was young, such as hurting a child in his class and harming animals. He was afraid to live because his experience had shown that within him was a demon that could wake up and destroy everything he had built. The group imagined him sitting in a cave, afraid to go out. At group sessions, he talked about many changes and successes in his life, but he felt that he was barely surviving. Aviv had lost hope that something would change. He told the group that they helped him find his place and establish connections with people, but he feared that there are things that cannot be fixed.

The current crisis began when I announced that a new participant would be joining the group. Aviv said that he did not have the strength to bare himself to someone new—not because he was worried about reenacting competition with his brother but because he was losing hope. He felt that he would not change much anymore. The members of the group told him that he has to have hope, that he can’t live in a place where he has no hope and cannot imagine any change.

“Hope always implies a belief in the possibility of improvement and of creativity,” explains Hopper—“that is, in the possibility of making something better and something new” (2001, p. 211). Hopper goes on to define hope as follows:

The willingness and ability to exercise the transcendent imagination in an attempt to overcome obstacles to the fulfilment of desirous expectations. Thus hope is always associated with resilience, tenacity, fortitude and a degree of “realistic optimism,” which are forged through the transmuting internalization of good-enough relationships with one’s primary objects, that is, with the breast as well as the phallus, and with the mother as well as the father, and with siblings as well as parents. On the basis of these virtuous achievements, a person is able to imagine possibilities for making creative use of traumatic experience (Hopper, p. 217).

I thought that for Aviv to leave the group at that point would be to give up. Perhaps there was something about him that I had yet to decipher. I must also admit that I was coming to the conclusion that the group analysis might have reached its limit and maybe Aviv needed something else to help him.

Sara, the new participant, started out with great energy. She arrived late to the first meeting and did not apologize. As a senior manager at work, she is accustomed to conducting meetings—and, indeed, she appeared to be trying to run the group session. The members responded in many ways; some loved her self-confidence. Aviv looked frightened and said that he was not happy with Sara’s joining the group, that her participation was undermining his sense of security. Sara explained that individual therapy had not helped her. She is a practical, emotionally detached person and wanted to see if a group setting would work for her. However, there was a growing feeling that she might leave the group and that she was a threat to the other participants. “She’s probably making more money than everyone here together,” said one of the women. Sara remained cold and distant. The first meeting ended with a great deal of tension, and I was upset and felt guilty that I might have destroyed the group by having Sara join.

In the next session, Yaron, another man in the group, asked Sarah how she was. She replied that she did not want to come again, that everything was fine with her. She said that the group was depressing and she felt unwanted. “Why can’t therapy be fun?” she asked.

Aviv tried to explain the difficulty he had had accepting new members in the past. Very quickly I sensed that Aviv considered Sara arrogant and unbearable and that she felt that he loathed her and was rejecting her. The tension between Aviv, Sara, and the group intensified. Slowly, over the weeks, the group continued to work, and Sara shared more of her painful feelings toward people—both her original family and her husband. She was emotionally distant and experienced difficulty with intimacy. As she put it, she got along well with numbers and was good at her work but felt very lonely socially. The group did not understand why there was tension between Aviv and Sara.

After four months, I told the group that another new participant would be joining. Aviv said that he could not bear it anymore; maybe it was time for him to leave. It was still hard for him with Sara. As far as he was concerned, she was insensitive and he could not share his painful places, especially where shame and guilt were concerned. Crying, Sara said that she didn’t understand and that maybe she is at a different—higher—level from that of the group. I told her that she was trying hard to be part of the group and to be nice to everyone but when she feels that it isn’t working, she insults people. I thought that the problem was that talking about jealousy and competition is difficult, and such conversations provoke emotional responses. I sensed that something very important was happening to Aviv and Sara and that if we could work with it, there would be hope for change.

At the next session, Sara said that she hadn’t wanted to come. She had expected me to call her to find out how she was, so she was disappointed. She felt that being in the group was depressing and wasn’t helping her. Yaron mentioned that when he joined the group, he, too, felt that Aviv was rejecting him, and it took him time to understand that as a younger child in his own family, his position in the group was like Aviv’s younger brother. Aviv saw Yaron as more successful and, as a result, could not stand him. In Yaron’s eyes, Aviv resembled Yaron’s older brothers and friends on the kibbutz where he grew up, who rejected him because he was the youngest and was less successful than they were. Yaron noted that working with Aviv helped him understand how he (Yaron) coped with people and found his place in a group. Yaron suggested that perhaps Aviv and Sara were reenacting something in their experience. Sara commented that the rejection by Aviv that she was experiencing was very difficult for her; Aviv countered that he saw her as bossy, taking up a lot of space, and uncommunicative—that one needs to walk on eggshells around her. This was the first time that I had seen Aviv reacting with such harsh and offensive statements.

The tension in the group rose. I wondered whether I should calm things down or just let the situation be for a while so that perhaps we could gain an insight into what was happening. Sara then attacked Aviv, saying that she did not understand what he was doing in the group. She thought that he was smug, that he was trying to dominate others, and that he neglected to raise the subject of his own vulnerability. Aviv arrogantly replied that he could say more offensive things to her but didn’t want to.

I told the group that something very powerful and meaningful was going on between Aviv and Sara. We could all feel the intensity of the aggression in both of them. Aviv smiled and Sara cried, paralyzing the group. I felt anger inside me and urged Aviv to connect what he was feeling with what he was saying. It seemed to me that Sara was hurting him, but he rejected that interpretation. I pointed out his aggression, which he did not take ownership of, and then he burst out crying and told me that he was undergoing a physical experience that could provoke him to kill Sara or me. That’s the demon that he had been talking about for years.

Slowly, over a period of months, we processed the emotional experiences that the group was undergoing for the first time. Sara, who was completely cut off from her older brother, expressed scorn for him and said she considered him inferior to her. She managed to share more of the childhood experiences in which she had felt rejected by him. He was friendly and funny and nice. She was the good girl and the good student, yet she was under the impression that her mother preferred him—the same feeling she experienced in the group. She was a successful professional, but the group and I liked Aviv more. In a gradual process, she began to recognize and take responsibility for her condescending attitude toward the group members.

It became clear that when Aviv was the object of an insult or felt inferior and extremely jealous, like what happened with Sara, it evoked in him anger and aggression in the form of condescension or sadism. After all these years, this was the first time that such feelings had been expressed in the group and the first time also that Aviv could begin to touch upon and understand what he had gone through in childhood. The intensity of the enactment resulted in powerful experiences for Sara and Aviv, as well as for the rest of the group and me as facilitator. In the group, Sara was Aviv’s little sister, whom he was jealous of. He managed to share the difficult places in childhood where he was physically or mentally abused and hurt others in a rage. Now he began to imagine change and hope that he could make peace with the demon inside him.

Sara associated with the intense feelings of rejection that she had experienced as a child. She was very small, and her brother and his friends would threaten her. She felt lonely and had suicidal thoughts. When she was hurt, she hurt back. She found it difficult to be intimate and was afraid of people like Aviv.

Sara and Aviv considered themselves victims of sadistic acts during childhood and within the group. Aviv talked about feeling trapped, both as a child and with me, because I did not let him escape from what he felt. The trapped feeling led to the sensation of an explosion inside him—the demon that he was afraid to feel.

The group continued to work, and the participants, including Sara and Aviv, felt hope.

“The imagination is limited by past experience, as is our ability to put into effect what we can imagine,” writes Hopper. “Personal, idiosyncratic, past experience limits the capacity to symbolize and to transcend the effects of current experience, especially traumatic experience” (p. 221). The ability to imagine and hope for a new relationship and new experiences “depends on becoming free from unconscious constraints of various kinds of bad objects and encapsulated traumatic experience,” Hopper continues (p. 222).

Finally, we can sum up hope in his words: “the very essence of attempts to make creative use of traumatic experience, which always involves reparation, restoration and restitution” (p. 206).

References

Ashuach,S. (2012). Am I my brother’s keeper? The analytic group as a space for re-enacting and treating sibling trauma. Group Analysis, 45(2); 155-167.

Grossmark, R. (2007) ‘From Familiar Chaos to Coherence: Unformulated Experience and Enactment in Group Psychotherapy’, in Melanie Suchet (ed.) Relational Psychoanalysis volume 3. New Voices. Adrienne Harris Lewis Aron: The Analytic Press, Chapter 11 pp. 193–208.

Hopper, E. (2001). On the Nature of Hope in Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. Brit. J. Psychotherapy., 18(2):205-226.

Mitchell, J. (2003) Sibling trauma: a theoretical consideration. In Coles, P. (eds) Sibling Relationships. London: Karnack, pp.155–174.

Mitchell, J. (2003) Siblings — Sex and Violence. Cambridge: Polity.

Mitchell, J. (2006). From Infant to Child: The Sibling Trauma, the Rite de Passage, and the Construction of the “Other” in the Social Group. Fort Da, 12(2):35

Mitchell, J. (2018).  Sibling trauma and the Law of the mother. A lecture in Tel-Aviv University.

Smadar Ashuach lives and practices in Israel, is a clinical psychologist, supervi­sor, training psychoanalyst and group analyst. A member of the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis and GAS, member of Tel- Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and member of OFEK-group relations organization.
Address: Haoranit 8 Tel- Mond, 406080, Israel.
smadar.ashuach@gmail.com