Out of Time: Siblings As Trauma Transmitters, Protectors, Sources of Courage: Meeting Ron Bodansky’s Protest

Abstract

This foray into largely uncharted psychoanalytic territory addresses Ron Bodansky’s question about what siblings have to do with psychological survival and healing in situations of extreme developmental trauma. This article speculates that, except when psychological organization has been destroyed at an age when before sibling connections become relevant—see “Fear of Breakdown” (Winnicott, 1974)—siblings can both transmit timeless intergenerational trauma within a generation, and contribute to the survival of such damage. Sketches from clinical work, as well as from the Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer families, illustrate these possibilities. A further conjecture suggests that sibling countertransferences contain the same two possibilities. Others may wish to extend or dispute these speculations.

Notes

1. ¹My interest most likely stems from my own history as the eldest of 10 in a significantly disturbed family. I am deeply grateful to my siblings for their witness and support, which have enabled me, in some measure, to make these available to others.

2. ²Probably Bodansky knows more about what this sister provided for his patient, as well as about the complications.

3. ³Of the fierce but exclusive sharing that Anna Freud observed among the 3-year-old survivors of concentration camp Terezin, Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004) write:

We have therefore given the name plural body to this artifact of survival set up against the perversions of barbarity and even against the best intentions. The children of Terezin hold no patent on this concept. Many other children find themselves needing to invent it every day, in the face of infantile and murderous imbecility of supposed adults who are, nevertheless, all-powerful on the domestic or political scale. (p. 217)

4. ⁴This section borrows from D. M. Orange (2009) and depends on Monk (1990) and Waugh (2008).

5. ⁵Like many young Viennese, Ludwig Wittgenstein was much impressed by the views of duty and genius to be found in Weininger (1906). Weininger committed suicide in the house of Beethoven.

6. ⁶Ich Weiss dass der Selbstmord immer eine Schweinerei ist. LW to Paul Englemann, 6/21/1920, GBW (Gesamtbriefwechsel, digital database).

7. ⁷Biographical information comes primarily from Bethge and Barnett (2000) and from his letters and papers from Tegel prison (Bonhoeffer and Bethge, 1971).

8. ⁸The 1935 Nuremberg laws in Germany deprived Jews of citizenship, made them subjects of the German Reich, forbade Jews to marry or to have sexual relations with Aryans, and made it illegal for Germans to hire Jewish women as household help. There followed many regulations defining who was a Jew.

9. ⁹The group of pastors who had signed the Barmen declaration in 1934, written primarily by Karl Barth, confessing that the German Evangelical Church which had sworn allegiance to Hitler was not the church of Christ.

10. ¹⁰Kairos is the ancient Greek word for the opportune or right moment: it contrasts with chronos, which refers to clock time.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna M. Orange

Dr. Orange is a member of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.