Sibling rivalry is one of the key life challenges for most people. According to a new book, “The Sibling Rivalry Effect,” conflicts arise every 17 minutes between 3-7 year-olds and every 9.5 minutes between 2-4 year-olds: an impressive frequency. Such struggles often last a life-time, and sibling relationships tend to be more long-lasting than any other. So why don’t the pressures—if not tortures—of sibling rivalry come up more often as a subject of artistic expression?

A recent article in the Boston Globe (February 19, 2012) by Katharine Whittemore begins with the fascinating fact that in the two dozen volumes of Freud’s writings, he only mentions sibling rivalry five times. Turns out Freud was his mother’s favorite, the eldest of seven and the only one to have his own room and an oil lamp for reading at night. One might posit that he wanted so badly to be an only child that he left the whole category of siblings out of his work, as though wishing them away altogether. Since Freud set the agenda for much of the psychoanalytic focus of the last hundred plus years, it’s no small wonder that the subject has taken a back seat in our cultural consciousness. But perhaps sibling rivalry’s time has come. Whittemore mentions four new books on the subject:

The Sibling Rivalry Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, by Jeffrey Kluger, who reviews the latest research and reports that “siblings are the boot camp of socialization.”

Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway. who offers fascinating stats on the effect of birth order on character, success in life, and likelihood of leading a revolution.

Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret, by Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist, who reviews iconic instances of siblings in literature and through interviews observes siblings’ tendency to regress in one another’s presence and recapitulate age-old animosities.

More Than Kin and Less than Kind: the Evolution of Family Conflict, by Douglas Mock, who explains animal adaptations to there being more offspring than can survive in the wild.

Now that research on the subject is more common, it will be interesting to see if the subject comes up more in films and novels. Could it be that the answer to its mysterious absence heretofore lies in the general wish not to have had to share parental love and attention, that writers and film-makers who got on well with their sibling have little need to work with the subject, while those who did not, prefer to avoid it altogether — like Freud?