Miriam Berger’s fascinating and poignant lecture (Berger, 2023) has drawn attention to a very important area of relating—the act of bearing witness. As she points out, witnessing belongs in the horizontal axis, and it begins in the sibling matrix.
In my response I will consider the importance of sibling witnessing in the family and its function in both individual and group therapy, illustrating this with a powerful example of sibling witnessing in my weekly therapy group.
AggerEM (1988) Psychoanalytic perspectives on sibling relationships. Psychoanalytic Inquiry8: 3–30.
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BergerM (2023) Facts matter: The analytic group between witnessing and horizontality [46th Annual Foulkes Lecture]. Group Analysis56(4): 445–458.
3.
FoulkesS (1948) Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy. London: William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd.
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ParkerV (2020) A Group-Analytic Exploration of the Sibling Matrix: How Siblings Shape our Lives. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
5.
StolperE (2022) Sibling Witnessing in Analytic Group Therapy. In: AshuachSBermanA (eds) Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice: Contemporary Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Organization Consultancy. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 146–156.
