THE MEDIATING ROLE OF A SIBLING IN IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT: CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE

Teodora Vuletić Joksimović

DOI Number
https://doi.org/10.22190/TEME231017050V
First page
873
Last page
890

Abstract


The main aim of this paper was to open the space for discussing siblings’ mutual effects on their identity development, fostering a specific contemporary psychoanalytic perspective – Lacan’s identity topology. By exploring the mother’s and the father’s ‘phallic functions’ in the subject’s identity development, I tripped over the same stone as classical psychoanalytic theory, which nudged me to challenge the sole relevance of the parental roles and pose a question of what the sibling-function in the process of developing identity would be. I adapted Lacan’s R-schema to honour these delicate family relationships and understand their underlying structure. Lacan emphasised the importance of siblings through the intrusion complex in his earliest work but ceased to deal with this topic afterward. However, he tended to preserve the foundations he had laid with the mirror stage and Oedipus complex – concepts based on identification. Therefore, in this work I tried to look at the co-constructing relationship between siblings in the context of the (de)identification phenomenon while taking into account Lacan’s latter works.


Keywords

siblings, identity, intrusion, de-identification, R-schema.

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.22190/TEME231017050V

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