Sibling Rivalry: Archetypal Conflicts and Shadow Dynamics in Families
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Sibling rivalry can bruise and build in equal measure. On the hard side, the older child feels toppled from the throne, the younger scrambles for a foothold, and both learn how quickly envy, resentment, and score-keeping ignite—whether over a parent’s extra hour of attention or the larger slice of birthday cake. Those early contests can calcify into adult grudges that surface in estate negotiations, workplace jockeying, or mismatched relationships.
Yet the same daily friction teaches useful skills: we sharpen empathy by reading a sibling’s next move, develop a theory of mind through constant negotiation, and discover that competition does not rule out loyalty—especially when a crisis calls every rival home. Listen and discover how sibling rivalry is both the first training ground for conflict and the first workshop for cooperation, shaping how we handle fairness, attachment, and resilience for the rest of our lives.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:04.2 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.7 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:19.4 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, |
| 0:24.9 | and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, |
| 0:31.1 | and Cape Cod. |
| 1:01.0 | Thank you. Today we are going to talk about sibling rivalry, a phrase that I think is no doubt very familiar to almost everyone. And a part of growing up with a brother or a sister or, you know, more than one brother and sister is what goes on there? And of course, |
| 1:10.3 | birth order contributes to it. |
| 1:13.1 | How do we find our own individual different nature from a competitive brother or sister? |
| 1:21.9 | And, of course, mythology and fairy tales are famous for depicting sibling rivals, most famously perhaps |
| 1:33.4 | Kane and Abel, but then we have Cinderella and her hostile siblings. And this kind of sibling |
| 1:41.8 | rivalry, resentment's competition, what have you, can continue well into adulthood when we might say to ourselves, oh, my goodness, am I still not over that? |
| 1:55.9 | No, there's always unfinished business from the past many a time. |
| 2:05.8 | So let's dive in and talk about sibling rivalry. |
| 2:12.0 | And of course, this is something that comes into the consulting room. I'm sort of going through my current caseload and siblings and difficult relationships with siblings and sibling rivalry are certainly something that comes up. |
| 2:21.5 | I'm also thinking about how kind of deeply, deeply archetypal it is. |
| 2:27.0 | I, one of my guilty pleasures is watching nest cams, which are, you know, naturalists will rig up cameras that show you |
| 2:40.9 | kind of the goings on and often in raptor nests. And it's just, you know, you get these baby |
| 2:47.4 | birds and one is often hatched one day and the next day another one hatches |
| 2:51.5 | and maybe the third the third day and so you've got you've got these these these birds and |
| 2:57.1 | they're all you know weak and in need of a great deal of care and the mama bird comes up or the |
| 3:03.2 | father bird uh you know with a with a big bug or part of a rabbit leg or something. And they're all just, |
... |
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