In Bored Panda’s previous interview with Helen Marlo, a licensed clinical psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst, certified through the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, we found that sibling relationships exert a powerful influence on one’s life and development.
Helen explained that the presence or absence of siblings is significant in shaping one’s experience, although one is not necessarily better or worse. “They are different. While we know siblings are influential, the effect of growing up with a sibling is not linear because the sibling relationship is complex. Some siblings become best friends while others are arch enemies.”
Moreover, there is an abundance of findings that generalize information about siblings, but Helen warns that it can be misleading. “For example, findings on the influence of birth order or recent research asserting that sibling relationships are more important than parent relationships. Often, these findings do not also acknowledge the influence of other important variables, including psychological, family, systemic, developmental, environmental, and cultural factors that mediate the influence of the sibling relationship.”
Interestingly, Helen argues that if we take an example of sibling conflict, we see that it is not necessarily negative. “Parental warmth during sibling conflict, for example, influences if the sibling conflict leads to healthy rather than divisive sibling relationships. It can help prepare one to develop problem-solving and negotiation skills,” she explained.
So while generalizations do not fit many sibling relationships, the psychoanalyst confirms that growing up with siblings is generally accompanied by having a stronger sense of being part of a family and with feeling less alienated and alone.
Helen explained that siblings have a daily influence on our lives. “They can be associated with many strong emotional memories, including sharing together in the traditions, joys, secrets, and challenges in family life. Siblings encounter the same experiences but they experience them in their own unique way and this can be sources of challenge and connection,” she said some time ago.
Sibling relationships are unique because they share together in one of life’s most important relationships, the parent relationship, for better and for worse. And there are many more reasons why this relationship is unlike any other “Sharing in this relationship can readily elicit complex, myriad feelings such as competition, jealousy, intimacy, inferiority, superiority, and resentment,” Helen said.
Moreover, “sibling relationships are unique because they occupy a distinct and different role relative to parents and other family members, even in cases when the sibling serves as a parent figure." Essentially, sibling roles are more fluid than the parental role and can include elements of being both family and friend.
Helen explained that siblings have a different function in the family than the parents. “For example, siblings support separation and independence from the parents and family; they share in a lived, joint history and experience of their family life, even if their experiences differ; they directly shape the experience of daily family life; they are uniquely able to help their siblings understand dimensions of their family life; and siblings help socialize their siblings in ways that parents cannot.”
