Sibling Relationships

Prophecy Coles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367326913
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919206
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For this volume, the author has brought together a group of distinguished writers to explore a wide range of issues affecting sibling relationships. This exciting collection of papers addresses a long neglected subject in psychoanalytic thinking. Since Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic attention has focused firmly on the Oedipal triangle and as a consequence sibling relationships have languished in virtual oblivion. In recent years the importance of siblings has started to be investigated but we are still at the beginning of formulating theory on this subject. This book raises fascinating issues for therapists who are forging new forms of thought on the interplay of sibling relationships.Contributors: Leonore Davidoff; R.D. Hinshelwood; Vivienne Lewin; Juliet Mitchell; Elspeth Morley; Estelle Roith; Margaret Rustin; Michael Rustin; Jennifer Silverstone; Harriet Thistlethwaite; and Gary Winship.

Part I
Culture and Literature

Chapter One
The sibling relationship and sibling incest in historical context

Leonore Davidoff

“The sibling is the beginning of the stranger”

(Japanese Proverb quoted in Sylvia Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese Americans, Stanford University Press, 1985, p. 193)

That tender union, all combin’d
Of Nature’s holiest sympathies
’Tis Friendship in its loveliest dress
’Tis Love’s most perfect tenderness

(Mary Ann Hedge, “Brother and Sister”, 1832)

From the thundering majesty of Greek tragedy to the brutal Icelandic sagas, to the sentimentality of such Victorian verses as the above, the relationship of brother and sister has haunted our cultural heritage. And in everyday lives some of the most powerful emotional bonds, as well as practical human interactions, still remain between brothers and sisters.¹ In the rare cases where historians have noticed sibling relationships, their importance has been evident. Sisters and brothers have acted as surrogate parents (and children), informal teachers, adult co-residents, friends, and even, on occasion, lovers.

Despite the centrality of this relationship, both historically and in contemporary life, it remains strangely neglected, relegated to a fragmentary footnote of the historical record. To understand why, it must first be understood as embedded within the seemingly ubiquitous phenomena of kinship and family. However, the concepts kinship and family are themselves products of Western cultural thought, culled from ideas about religion, nationality, ethnicity, social class, welfare and health provisions, division of property, notions of social honour, of “the person”, and all of these framed by perceptions of gender.²

All we can claim at the moment is that for modern (and even postmodern) Western societies, family and kinship still provide systematic patterns based on symbols, as well as structures that try to make sense of the basic problems of order and individual identity connected with birth, socialization, and succession. They have been seen, therefore, as the “building blocks” of society as well as a symbolic idiom of political and economic relationships, and, as such, they have both to respond to and make meaningful change and represent that which is stable.

While ultimately rooted in physical reproduction, both kinship and family are centrally organized around an assumed gender order; indeed, it has been argued that the gender and kinship systems are mutually constructed, since kinship is based on the division between politico-jural and domestic domains.³ In Western societies, this has meant that historically what may appear to be a natural order has been heavily moulded by those power centres of culture and material resources, the church and the state including the legal system.⁴

The power of definition is especially significant in the case of siblings whose social relations are organized along horizontal lines (at least theoretically), as collaterals, rather than through vertical lines of filiation. Unlike spouses, however, siblings have no direct effect on reproduction—in short, the sibling relationship is the structural basis for neither the formation of families nor their continuation. On the contrary, their presence can be potentially divisive, fragmenting material, cultural, and emotional resources. In this sense, siblings occupy the boundaries between familial and the non-familial, possible strangers.

The analysis of historical change is further complicated by the issue of from whose viewpoint these structures, symbolic orders and organizing principles have been created. In the nineteenth century, when the concept of kinship systems was being formed, it was the central adult “ego”, usually male, who was the focus of the grid of kinship. Recently, however, there has been a shift in perspective: family and kinship systems are increasingly regarded as process. The lived meaning of kinship ties, as well as non-kin close personal relationships, has begun to override rigidly defined categories. For example even as late as eighteenth-century England, just as the word family encompassed non-relatives, friend also referred to kin.⁵

At first sight, defining brother and sister might seem deceptively simple. Since human beings are capable of reproducing more than one offspring over a lifetime, the sharing of at least one common parent would be enough to ensure the categories. But immediately there are gradations implied by the expectation of a two-parent norm, so that we have half-siblings who share one physical parent but not the other, and step-siblings who share a parent through remarriage but not through physical reproduction.⁶ The latter category raises issues about whether it is the “blood” relationship (consanguinity) or social kinship through marriage (affinality)—or both—that should be the defining characteristic of kin relations, including siblingship. The instability and variability of these definitions is to be found both historically and in a wide variety of cross-cultural contemporary studies. For example, in societies with a matrilineal focus, a brother has special interest in his sister’s children who, in turn, recognize him, rather than their physical father, as the central masculine figure.⁷

Yet, despite such variance, a common theme seems to run through the notion of brotherhood and sisterhood, one that is related to basic issues of personal identity and the formation of self. The myth of Narcissus, searching for himself in his own reflection, is echoed in many beliefs about siblings. But, as with parts of the self, brothers and sisters can represent rejected traits, values, and behaviours; they can repel as well as attract. Because of their shared parentage, all siblings, whether of the same or different sex, seem to possess a special quality of “unity in difference”, a mirroring of the self, two parts of one whole “split along the fault lines of ambivalence”.⁸

There are several reasons for the inherent tension between identification and repulsion among siblings, a quality captured in George Eliot’s phrase “a like, unlike”, in her poem “Brother and Sister”. One reason for this is the probable sharing of childhood experiences within the household, Eliot’s “two flowers growing on one stem”.⁹ The effects of a mutual infancy and childhood are expressed in a passage written in the 1830s by Alfred Tennyson, whose hero speaks, significantly, about a foster-sister with whom he later fell in love:¹⁰

She was my foster-sister: on one arm
The flaxen ringlets of our infancies
Wandered, the while we rested: one soft lap
Pillowed us both: a common light of eyes
Was on us as we lay: our baby lips
Kissing one bosom, ever drew from thence
The stream of life, one stream, one life, one blood.

The shared childhood, the shared name, and the sharing of family resources as well as traditions could also bring out the opposite emotions of envy or disengagement. Precisely because the bonds could be threateningly and smotheringly close, there was often rivalry and the enhancement of difference. From Cain and Abel onwards, in Western culture, the struggle over parental love, resources, and rewards has often meant that brothers and sisters spell trouble. “A rapid shift of ‘hot and cold’ acceptance and rejection, closeness and distance seems more characteristic of these ties than any other”, and—media attention notwithstanding—conflict and violence within families is most common between siblings, although contained within a relatively safe environment and often condoned by adults.¹¹

In structural terms, siblings are not always the equals portrayed in the model or the ideal. Given the long period in which a parent is capable of generating children (even for women, well over twenty years), some siblings will be of an age that is more like a parent than peer generation to those born later in the family. And in cultures which emphasize masculine primacy, all brothers, including the younger, start with power and privilege over all sisters, no matter what the age differences.¹² This potential age gap between siblings, large enough to create pseudo-generational differences, muddies the categories and confuses clear authority lines, creating an intermediate generation between parents and children. When the eldest siblings married and had young children of their own, their teenage sisters and brothers would often come live with them for various periods of time as mother’s helpers or apprentices, as playmates to their young “nieces and nephews” close in age to themselves.¹³ Although families with large numbers of offspring would obviously be more likely to exhibit such a pattern, two or three siblings could still be widely spaced. In the centuries before the fall in family size, high infant and child mortality could leave large gaps between siblings and in all periods the likelihood of such wide age differences is increased in step- and half-sibling relationships.¹⁴

Since a common childhood milieu is usually a large constituent in creating a sibling relationship, one of the most significant qualities of the role is its impact on the moulding of gender identity, in emotional terms as well as behaviour. Particularly in cultures that differentiate sharply between the genders, inculcating appropriate forms of femininity and masculinity into young children is a high priority. Brothers and sisters, in a way not possible in single-sex and only-child families, can rehearse the sexual division of labour, from tasks to emotions. The tension between prescribed gender ideals and the realities of physique, personality, birth order, and relationship to parents and other adults in the household has produced some of the most salient “family dramas”.¹⁵

In modern Western society some of the most vivid memories of what femininity meant to young girls are in relation to their brothers. In some cases this could mean pride in carrying out a womanly role, being “little mother” to others in the family. In others it could be bitterness about curtailment of free time and allocation of fewer family resources.¹⁶ In particular, girls’ personal loyalty towards, and involvement with, their brothers’ concerns may have been stressed, while the boys in the family- took for granted both their right and their duty to turn to external pursuits. A brother acting as instructor, guide, or “window on the world” for sisters was also being initiated into the wider sphere outside the family, an opportunity often denied many girls.¹⁷ This pattern has been widespread but may have differed significantly depending on class, family, and community culture. For example, in many sections of the British working class girls took an active role in gaining employment and might well have acted for their brothers.

For the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, from which so much of our literary heritage derives, there was an almost compulsive focus on contrasting masculine and feminine categories, at a time when these attributes were integral to bourgeois identity. The way this could be played out through sibling relationships echoes in Victorian texts. Harriet Martineau had helped bring up her younger brother James as well as a sister. But in early adulthood she and James had a violent disagreement over religious beliefs that was never reconciled. The attachment Harriet felt for James was the strongest passion of her life; obsessive love tinged with envy is evident in her statement that “brothers are to sisters what sisters can never be to brothers as objects of engrossing and devoted affection”, a sentiment also expressed in numerous diaries, memoirs, and letters of the period.¹⁸ Such attachments could be to a brother’s advantage, as in families where the sister contributed to his education and occupational mobility, or where she forwent part of her own patrimony, or worked to provide income for his further training and/or capital for his setting up in a trade, profession, or enterprise.¹⁹

Between brothers, and between sisters, too, siblings can provide models to be emulated or rejected. Since there is always a range of masculine and feminine behaviours and meanings available, children and young people are acutely aware of same-sex siblings as models, sometimes identifying with one another but sometimes rejecting such identification. In some cases, these patterns take the form of rebellion against parents and authority figures; in others, a sister or brother can become conformist as a form of rejection of a rebellious sib.²⁰

Thus, although both same- and opposite-sex siblings provide models, the content and the form may differ according to the general expectations of gender roles. Brothers and sisters represent the comparative reference group par excellence, effective kin from birth and, unlike friends, social givens.²¹ In their shadow, decisions—subconscious as well as conscious—are made about life choices, even in situations where those choices are severely limited by material and financial deprivation.

The historical picture of siblings is also blurred because kinship relations have so often been used as metaphor. The idea of “a double singleness” has made both same and cross-sex siblings a favourite device for exploring some of the social, moral, and spiritual questions in many cultures. When potential identification is even greater, as in the case of twins, the fascination about individual identity and consciousness is more marked. Twinship confounds the sense that each person must be unique but also plays to the longing for perfect understanding, the myth of twin souls. Many cultures assign special and magical qualities to twins, either good or evil, someti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• PART I: CULTURE AND LITERATURE
• PART II: CLINICAL THEORY
• INDEX