Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine:
To live in society involves putting up with people who we did not choose to know and may in fact prefer not to exist. Even those we basically like and get along with are sure, from time to time, to inspire in us the wish that they would (painlessly, briefly) disappear. But it is an obdurate and inconvenient fact that people don’t turn on and off like appliances; they don’t come into or out of being according to our will. To be in a relationship with others—whether platonic, romantic, or political—requires enduring them without going crazy. Our earliest and most formative experience with the problem of other people is the sibling relationship.
Psychoanalysts say that around the age of two or two and a half, children become preoccupied with the notion of siblings.
More here.
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