Issues surrounding sibling death during-adolescence

This paper will examine the inability of adolescents to mourn their siblings and the resultant isolation from family and peers caused by their insistence on a stance of normalcy. The issues of adolescence—consolidation of ego identity, emotional separation from the family, and the concomitant greater investment in the peer group—are all impacted upon by the death of a sibling. An examination of the effect of sibling death on this process will show how the inability of the adolescent to pass through the separation individuation process of adolescence or to give up the libidinal cathexis of the lost object (the goal of mourning) leads to an emotional overinvestment in the family of origin.