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Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process

Author(s) : Johanna Dobrich

Reviews and Endorsements

With a soulful, fierce intellect and unflinching honesty, Johanna Dobrich brings her reader into an intimate and keenly observed examination of the ways in which her experience as the sibling of a severely disabled brother has shaped both her psychic life and analytic understanding. In doing so, she creates a larger portal for considering how minds respond to developmental traumas that go unseen, unacknowledged and unformulated. This impressive book joins memoir and interview material with a rigorous engagement of contemporary relational thinking. The result is a richly textured tapestry that marries experience with theory to produce an inspiring clinical wisdom that demonstrates how healing the other and healing oneself is a false distinction. Whether or not you are a survivor sibling or even a sibling, you will find yourself in these pages and know yourself and analytic theory all the better for it. - Martin Stephen Frommer, Ph.D. Faculty, Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

This long-overdue book belongs in the library of all psychoanalytic therapists. It is a significant contribution to relational scholarship. It is also a gift to the many therapists who grew up alongside a damaged brother or sister, chose their profession partly because of their struggles and achievements as a sibling, and yet have never been fully able to tell their complex stories - partly because psychoanalysis itself lacked the space for such narratives. Dobrich has mined her own experience as a "survivor sibling" in a ground-breaking qualitative study. Her voice is intimate and compassionate, her interviews with colleagues of comparable backgrounds are riveting, and the illumination she offers to readers of any sibling background is profound. - Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology.


In Johanna Dobrich's Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process, we have a major and long-awaited new contribution that fills a tremendous gap in the fields of psychoanalysis. Lacking in all these different traditions is a sustained, coherent, and comprehensive account of what happens to a human subject, personally, relationally, and professionally, when she lives alongside and survives a disabled sibling. Beyond sublimation as de-instinctualization, what is her call when she herself becomes a Relational psychoanalyst? Dobrich provides a multitude of rich naive descriptions from her research that are themselves a platform for thinking about difficulties in mentalization, microtraumatic attachments, identifications, and uncanny reactivations of maladaptive attachments across generations that a patient can resubjectivize in a clinical relationship. This book is timely, supremely relevant and a pleasure to read. - Maurice Apprey, Professor of Psychiatry, Member of the Academy of Distinguished Educators, University of Virginia School of Medicine, is a training and supervising analyst of the Contemporary Freudian Society.