How to go back to looking at dreams as mere oneiric poetry, nocturnal fluff, when you know they must be representing something your conscious mind is too cowardly to handle?

After reading Freud, you are never the same. If you are interested enough, you may even become this overanalyzing human thing, constantly trying to decode the individual and social mechanisms behind other people’s facades.

You simply can’t live on the surface of things anymore because you know there is always more. Someone is always hiding something, consciously or not. “Yes” that means “No,” “I hate you” that means “I love you,” the cruelty behind every single desire.

This need to solve, or at least begin to comprehend, the human psyche can be both a gift and a nightmare. It seems more likely to find happiness in simpler contexts, in blissful ignorance.

The more you search, the uglier things begin to seem. And the more cruel people start to become. For their own survival.

How to fall in love when you know love to be a mere defense mechanism, a delusional tool? How to believe anyone’s words when you know them to be only the tips of icebergs of individualistic cruelties?

This gift of visibility of the hidden and the naked horror that comes with it is also addicting. How to go back to looking at dreams as mere oneiric poetry, nocturnal fluff, when you know they must be representing something your conscious mind is too cowardly to handle?

Things begin to always be our fault but ultimately linked to our father and mother figures. And the phallus, of course — or its lacking.

But one element that is under-explored and underrated is the role that siblings play in the development of our identities. While our parents may be the first contact we have to the physical world, the presence of our siblings (especially older ones) is one we cannot underestimate as a shaping force.

Complexes of Electra and Oedipus aside, our siblings should be thought of as very strong tools for psychological development as well. While we may put our parents on pedestals, siblings can be seen as “the fair other.”

They are, somewhat, in a position of equality, sharing the same house, the same guardians, the same rules. Demystified beings to whom we do not necessarily own explanations or obedience. They have no castrating power over us.

If the parents are the presidents of this household republic, the siblings may be our fellow senators. Or, at least, our fellow citizens.

And in a sense, they cannot help but be our non-selves, an anti-mirror of sorts, a chance to look at our microcosms from the outside. They may be stand-ins, people even our conscious mind can handle to look at unabashedly, unlike ourselves.

They become constantly available figures of comparison. And it is by comparing that we grasp a lot of concepts of right, wrong, good, bad, ugly, beautiful, better, worse.

A healthy relationship among siblings, but also one full of equality, seems to be crucial to identity development.

If the president gives more money to one senator than to the other, and we see that as completely unfair, that will shape the way we look at that president, the parent, from that moment on. And the way we hate, and love, our fellow senator. We might begin to use him or her as testing tube, muse, shield or crutch for our own unfulfilled desires.

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