Susan A. Klett Part 2

The Significance of The Sibling Experience: Its’ Impact on Development, Attachment, and Identity - Part 2

Although siblings accompany us within our family of origin throughout all of our developmental stages and are often the longest relationship in our lives, scarce attention has been paid to conscious and unconscious influences of siblings in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Our sense of self is not only developed through the gaze of our mother and/or father, but the position in which they value us in relationship to our siblings. It is our siblings who first socialize us into the world of “the other” our peers and influence how we continue to establish our identity through our differences and alikeness to others throughout our lifespan.

The aim of this seminar is to increase awareness and greater understanding of the profound and pervasive impact of unique and complex sibling dynamics on development, attachment, separation-individuation, identity formation and character styles. To gain a theoretical understanding of sibling relations to widen the scope of clinical practice to include listening for both vertical (parental) and lateral (sibling) dimensions of psychic life, both in relation to and autonomous from parental influences.

Part II
The nature of sibling relationships, in all their complex forms of
love and hate, still remains more of a mystery than the passions
and developmental vicissitudes of parent-child relationships
(Sharpe & Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 491).

In this seminar I will present an in-depth case study of “The Two Analyses of Mrs. B” which illustrates to an extraordinary degree, the impact that a challenging sibling has on their siblings, parents, and the family dynamic. I anchored this presentation in two theories, Developmental Sibling Relational Systems Theory (Klett, 2016, 2017, 2023) and Sibling Thinking Theory with emphasis on the concepts of “The Law of the Mother” and “Seriality” (Mitchell, 2000, 2003, 2013).
Within this seminar we will have the opportunity to examine the differences and similarities between a sibling enmeshment and a binary between siblings and to explore the lived experience of the envied and the envying. I augment this study by sharing the imprint of sibling experiences on two prominent artists, Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Munch, as reflected in their conflicted relationships and represented in their art.

About the Speaker:

Susan A. Klett, Ph.D., Psy.D., LCSW-R, is a training and supervising analyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles and a faculty member, supervising and training analyst at various psychoanalytic institutes in New York City. She is a past President and board member of The Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society and a former Co-Director and board member of Washington Square Institute for Mental Health. Dr. Klett is the founder and past Director of the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Training and Skill Group Program at WSI.
She is co- author of Analysis of the Incest Trauma: Retrieval, Recovery, Renewal (Karnac; 2015) and has published articles and reviews on trauma, eating disorders, couple treatment and the psychoanalytic process. She has received a Humanitarian Award for her work with the victims and families of the World Trade Center Disaster (9/11), and has presented nationally and internationally on trauma and personality disorders. Dr. Klett maintains a private practice in Manhattan working with individuals, couples, groups and provides supervision to clinicians and consultations to educational organizations.