A new take on Joseph and his brothers: Siblings as a potential rescue from parental destructiveness

Joseph, the Bible’s dreamer, almost lost his life by telling his dreams in the family. Dreams told include both vertical as well as horizontal aspects. Dreaming uses personal past (vertical) experience to elaborate excessive threatening or glorious emotions. This elaboration process, if unfinished, may continue through the use of relationships and partnerships (horizontal) who assist in further digesting uncontained emotional challenges. Fortunately, Joseph’s and his brothers’ repetition of Kain and Abel’s envy-based tragedy did not end in his homicide. On the other hand, the plot of his siblings to commit Joseph’s murder could have ended differently had they grasped his needs for their containment. In the end, a wonderful development actually happened much later when the same group of brothers met again. In Egypt, the sibling/horizontal axis, in the absence of their father Jacob, co-created a safe space for their family development. If only they had understood earlier the conflict communicated by Joseph’s dreams between the horizontal and the vertical/intergenerational family dynamics. Jacob, their father, had tried to cure his own inferiority complex by inflating his youngest son Joseph’s narcissism. He later sacrificed this same son, repeating Abraham’s binding of his sons Isaac and Ishmael. Joseph sharing his megalomaniac dreams with his brothers can be seen as an unconscious “request of containment”, as a cry to be saved from his father’s disturbances.