This discussion of Juliet Mitchell's paper "Siblings: Thinking Theory" places her work within the context of three frameworks: nonlinear thinking, disposition, and phallocentrism. The nonlinear dimension of the developmental process demonstrates how the sibling experience is not static, but rather is subject to a natural transmogrification toward new adaptive forms and meanings that occur over the sequential progress of organizational growth. Secondly, dispositional variables tend to be overlooked in their role in how brothers and sisters engage one another, titrate closeness and separateness, and creatively live out their love, admiration, hate, envy, and rivalry with each other. Sensitivities in dispositional leanings, such as special empathic qualities, may even serve to mitigate sibling turbulence. Lastly, the phallocentricity in Western societies privileges an implicitly male perspective that envisions sibling relationships in terms of threatening competitors, as the common linguistic phrase sibling rivalry suggests. This inflection in culture disregards more-expanding qualities in object relationships and aim-giving strategies that are exchanged in sibling play. These variables are not the sole contributors to the sibling experience, but a sampling of influences both from within and outside the child that affect that experience.

The often neglected nonlinear dimension of the developmental process is described and its usefulness in the consulting room will be highlighted by a clinical example of the psychoanalytic treatment of an adolescent. The concept of transformation and its linkage with nonlinearity and discontinuity are also outlined.

A transformational process from latency to adolescence is tracked in this essay of a disturbed boy who required an innovative therapeutic action that did not rely on the standard technique of interpretation of defense and conflict. The de-stabilization of the patient's mind-set as a victim was leveraged by the analyst's taking an extreme stance in keeping her own reflections to herself and, instead, assisting the boy's capacity to experience himself as an agent in his own right as he took us both on his journey towards self-discovery. This technical strategy also facilitated the shoring up of fragile self and object boundaries, provided a necessary fillip in the boy's capacity for affect differentiation and integration, and helped to create linkages between self and object representations in the present with hoped-for images of self and other in the future.

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A study group on Conceptualizing Transformation in Child and Adult Analysis focused on a particular kind of change in analysis, that of transformational change, a change in organization that could not be predicted from what came before. We found that, based on careful presentations of four analytic cases, transformational or pre-transformational change did take place. A central intervening variable was the patient's development of a sense of agency. We tried to articulate the nature of the interventions leading to agency and ultimately to transformation. We added other new dimensions: an emphasis on construction in addition to reconstruction and a focus on the future.