Siblings E-Book

Juliet Mitchell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 516

Beschreibung

Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which we might understand them. In the Western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or ascent: mother or father to child, or child to parent. Yet our ideals are 'liberty, equality and fraternity' or the 'sisterhood' of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of 'fratricide'. When we grow up, siblings feature prominently in sex, violence and the construction of gender differences but they are absent from our theories. This book examines the reasons for this omission and begins the search for a new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships. This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to a wide general readership.

Leseprobe

Copyright © Juliet Mitchell 2003

The right of Juliet Mitchell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2003 by Polity Press in association withBlackwell Publishing Ltd.

Reprinted 2004, 2007, 2008

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchell, Juliet, 1940–Siblings : sex and violence / Juliet Mitchell.         p. cm.      Includes bibliographical references and index.      ISBN 978-0-7456-3221-6 (pb : alk. paper)      1. Brothers and sisters. 2. Sex (Psychology) 3. Violence. 4. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.BF723.S43 M58 2003155.44'3—dc21

2003007589

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by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in the United States by Odyssey Press Inc.,

Gonic, New Hampshire

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

1    Siblings and Psychoanalysis: an Overview

2    Did Oedipus have a Sister?

3    Sister–Brother/Brother–Sister Incest

4    Looking Sideways: ‘A Child is being Beaten’

5    The Difference between Gender and Sexual Difference

6    Who's been Sitting in My Chair?

7    Attachment and Maternal Deprivation: How did John Bowlby Miss the Siblings?

8    In our Own Times: Sexuality, Psychoanalysis and Social Change

9    Conclusion: Siblings and the Engendering of Gender

Notes

References and Select Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

The Princesses Sibylla, Emilia and Sidonia von Sachsen by Lucas Cranach the Elder

Cain Slaying Abel by Peter Paul Rubens

Two sisters

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau

The Brontë Sisters by Patrick Branwell Brontë

Siegmund and Sieglinde by Arthur Rackham

Archdukes Maximilian II, Ferdinand II and Johann by Jakob Seisenegger

The Daughters of Sir Matthew Decker, Bart by Jan de Meyer

Heneage Lloyd and his Sister by Thomas Gainsborough

Hermes, Herse and Aglauros by Paolo Veronese

The Cholmondeley Ladies, British School

Twins by Duffy Ayers

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ann Bone, John Cornwell, Susan Cross, Jack Goody, Bogdan Lesnik, Carol Long, Polly Rossdale, John Thompson, Lisa Young and the generosity, intellectual and material, of Jesus College and its Fellows, Cambridge.

Early versions of some of the chapters in this book have been given as lectures or parts of lectures at a number of venues, including the Institut Français, London; the Institutes of Psychoanalysis, Berlin, London and Stockholm; the London School of Economics; the universities of Essex, Florida State, Ghana, Llublyana, London and Stockholm; the European University Institute, department of History and Civilization, Florence; the Institutes of Group Analysis, London and Cambridge; the Institute of Philosophy, Naples; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; to the British Association of Psychotherapists, the London Centre for Psychotherapy and at the 2001 John Bowlby Memorial Conference. Part of chapter 4 was published as ‘“Seitwärts schauen”: Die Psychoanalyse und das Problem der Geschwisterbeziehung’ in Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, vol. 43 (Frommann-Holzboog, 2001).

Preface

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 1, United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

Recent analysis has pointed to the absence of women in the brotherhood of men, in particular in the ideal of fraternity which characterizes the social contract of contemporary Western societies. Brotherhood has been seen as one of the faces of patriarchy. My own view is that, although it is an aspect of male dominance, it is importantly different – the assimilation of ‘brotherhood’ to patriarchy is an illustration of the way all is subjugated to vertical understandings at the cost of omitting the lateral. Indeed, I have come to think that this ‘verticalization’ may be a major means whereby the ideologies (including sexism) of the brotherhood are allowed to operate unseen.

I was first led to the importance of siblings through a study of hysteria published as Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000a). Since then, I have found that ‘thinking siblings’ leads to a seemingly never-ending series of questions – material for yet further analysis. I am naturally aware of the only child. Although this may change, I believe so far in the world's history we all have or expect to have a sister or brother and this is psychically and socially crucial; in a complex way, peers replace siblings. Everyone always, of course, knew about the importance of siblings but linking them to everybody's actual or potential pathology, to the depths of our loves and lives, hates and deaths, opens up a rich vein of enquiry.

The present book is something of a second way-station (Mad Men and Medusas was the first) to which my clinical material as a psychoanalyst has brought me, but out of which a large number of tracks lead to various places in all the disciplines that study human society through observation, ‘testing’, fictional creation or any other means. My use of a range of sources, from anecdote to neuropsychiatry, via politics, gender studies, novels, films, anthropology … is not the result of a doctrinal commitment to interdisciplinarity, but simply because I believe we need to use anything available that helps us create a picture and make sense of the object under investigation. Thus, like the long and deep clinical exchanges which are at their base, the reflections and propositions developed here are ‘up for grabs’ – they can be confirmed, elaborated or repudiated – any response adds something in this field which asks us to look differently. The book is thus hopefully part of a dialogue.

In what was indeed a famous dialogue that became a heated debate in the 1920s, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that the permissions and prohibitions in relations between sisters and brothers may be more important than those between parents and children. Ernest Jones, a leading psychoanalyst, powerfully disagreed. Jones asserted the universal centrality of the totems and taboos on child–mother incest and child–father murder (the so-called Oedipus complex) for the construction of all human culture. The argument was not resolved but the general tendency in all the social sciences has been to greatly privilege over all else the vertical relationship of child-to-parent; since the 1920s in particular, that of the infant with its mother. How far may this emphasis be ethnocentric, how far may this be an analysis in the service of an ideological prescription that exists in ignorance of what everybody knows – the importance of siblings? Recently in a small village I know well in southern France, a friend discussing her young daughters with me commented, ‘Of course they are much more important to each other in the long run than I am to them – after all, they'll know each other all their lives.’

Our ignoring of siblings is, paradoxically, part of our emphasis on childhood at the expense of adulthood as the formative part of human experience. This tendency, I believe, starts in the Western world's seventeenth century (Ariès 1962); thereafter it gathers momentum until its intensification in the nineteenth then the twentieth century. Yet those who study children are, of course, adults, with the effect that the vertical relationship of parent–child is replicated in the mode of enquiry. This is clearly true of psychoanalysis, which uses the ‘transference’ of a child's feelings for its parents to the person of the adult therapist as its central mode of investigation. Malinowski's emphasis on brothers and sisters became understood as the importance of the mother's brother – in other words, it was ‘verticalized’ onto the problem of descent rather than the concerns of laterality.

The Princesses Sibylla, Emilia and Sidonia von Sachsen by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1535), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

According to Malinowski, among the Trobrianders eighty years ago child–parent relations were affectionate, with little suggestion of any sexualization either as infantile desire or as parental abuse. Brother and sister relationships were forbidden territory:

[A]bove all the children are left entirely to themselves in their love affairs. Not only is there no parental interference, but rarely, if ever, does it come about that a man or woman takes a perverse sexual interest in children … a person who played sexually with a child would be thought ridiculous and disgusting … From an early age … brothers and sisters of the same mothers must be separated from each other, in obedience to the strict taboo which enjoins that there shall be no intimate relations between them. (Malinowski 1927: 57)

The strenuous prohibitions on sibling love were internalized already by very small children but would themselves seem to have produced the psychic conditions so well described by psychoanalysis in relation to parents – the prohibition sets up repression which creates the desires as existing only unconsciously. At the same time, the affectionate ties to parents and the tabooed sister–brother relationship are socially endorsed by the formation of what Malinowski labels ‘a republic of children’. The children form social groups (from any one of which a sister or a brother are excluded) but within which enquiry, sexual exploration, social organization, control of violent feelings through play – all without adult intervention – take place.

A number of thoughts arise from reading Malinowski's material. It confirms the suggestion in chapter 5 which separates sexuality from reproduction. Further, it raises the question as to why we put so much emphasis on biological parents. Jones vigorously contended that in recognizing a social rather than a biological father, the Trobrianders were living in a state of denial; Malinowski responded that the open sexual play of the children did not lead to reproduction so it was quite natural for Trobrianders not to connect sexuality and procreation unless a certain marital status and its conditions had been put in place – producing a social rather than biological meaning of fatherhood. This leads me to consider the fact that we take for granted the importance of biological fatherhood. Once again, I think we find that looking from the position of social siblinghood gives a different perspective on biological parenthood.

We do not need to get bogged down in a debate about social versus biological fathers – both arise in specific socio-historical conditions. I suggest that what is apparently a ‘universal’ emphasis on the exclusive importance of ‘natural’ paternity is in fact a marked feature of Western societies that are organized around ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ – the so-called ‘brotherhood of man’. Freud explicitly considered that the intellectual leap needed to accept the role of the biological father without the material evidence of parenting, as in motherhood, constituted the single greatest achievement of human ideational progress. However, it is not only the Trobrianders for whom this leap has been unnecessary. We need to look at the issue the other way around: when and why did the biological parent become so crucial for us? The history is an uneven one – for instance, the biological mother was not considered crucial for the poor working-class child until the Second World War; likewise the upper-class mother – one of the first disagreements between the present Queen of England and her daughter-in-law Diana centred around the Queen's contention that William, Diana's young baby, should not accompany his mother on a trip to Australia.

One important moment for the so-called leap to conceptualizing the biological father as the abstract idea of the only possible father is the late seventeenth-century debates between them (chapter 9). It is not that the biological parent is the conscious point of the controversy between patriarchalists and contract theorists – rather that it is interesting to read this parent into the controversial concepts of the family. For the patriarchalists, notoriously Sir Robert Filmer, the father was the only parent of the family and therefore of society – one was a microcosm of the other. (Until the eighteenth century the mother was thought to be only a vehicle for the father's seed (Hufton 1995).) For the contract theorists my initial reading suggests that the new division of private and public depended on the notion of the biological parents being at the centre of the ‘private’. Instead of ‘nature’ being the basis of society (the patriarchalists), the ‘natural-biological’ equals the private sphere within, but separate from, the polity. ‘Nature’ is one of those ‘switch’ words that mark the transition of a concept: natural is both the most basic relationship and at the same time what is illegitimate – belonging to a nature that has not been socialized. When Shakespeare has Gloucester compare his ‘legitimate Edgar’ with his bastard (‘natural’) son Edmund – ‘the whor'son must be acknowledged’ – it is as though he is pointing to the new emphasis on the place of biology within the law.

Not only Freud, but Engels, indeed ‘everyone’ since the rise of ‘modern times’ has argued that the all-importance of biological paternity explains the need to know the wife is the mother of the child. The supremacy of biological kinship may be a crucial ideological postulate of the social contract – it takes over from ‘the state of nature’ that previously explained and contained women as outside the polity. Within contract theory biological fatherhood and motherhood is the placing of nature within society – as an untouchable, no-go, rock-bottom unchangeable enclave. Thus not to recognize its importance is in Jones's arguments to rely on a delusory denial. From the viewpoint of the West, Jones is correct – but not from the viewpoint of a society that is concerned instead with the biological contiguity of sisters and brothers and the social meaning of fatherhood.

It is almost as though social parenthood and biological siblinghood on the one hand, and social siblinghood and biological parenthood on the other, run in these coordinated pairs. If parenthood is constructed as biological in the thinking of societies largely based on the social fraternity of contract theory, the biological relationship of siblings is not constructed as a structural moment in the social organization – the creation of the all-important social brotherhood. This absence of a social significance for biological siblinghood may be why we have overlooked the extent and significance of sibling abuse (Cawson et al. 2000 and chapter 3), which would have been not only utterly appalling but highly visible to the Trobrianders.

Yet without deliberately intending it, we may have created structures of lateral peer group organizations that do recognize biological sibling taboos. We establish schools which by and large are age-specific enterprises so that rarely are siblings in the same class and hence the same peer group. Schools thus function somewhat as Malinowski's perception of the ‘republic of Trobriand children’. However, there is the same major difference – we preserve once again our vertical structures through teachers standing in loco parentis.

So it seems that our concentration on the child since the seventeenth century has been exactly that – an adult focus on the child and the analytic modalities which see the child within the context of the adults on whom it depends or is made to depend. This surely is, in part at least, why siblings, even as children, have been missing from the picture – they can get on with it on their own but are not visible except in the presence of adults. Children in Western societies are thought to commit incest with each other because of insufficient parental care and control. It is as though our elevation of the social, political and economic story of the ideals of brotherhood depended on a diminution of the significance of blood sibling ties. A brother's murder of an adulterous sister in a Muslim family, or a brother's rape of a younger sibling in an impoverished lone mother household are seen as alike. In fact they are alike only in being outside the Western social contract. They are, however, different. The first belongs to a social order based on a blood relationship, whereas the second arises from the absence of a social place and understanding of such blood relationships within a Western system. The rise in childhood violence and abusiveness can thus be seen as not only due to the loss of parental or other vertical authorization of care and control but also to the absence of a social place for biological siblinghood within a polity based on abstract ideals of social brotherhood. This does not of course condone the death of an adulterous sister in the example above: I have simply taken the instance of another social system to illustrate that Western shock at other practices demonstrates not just so-called ‘othering’ but more pertinently, the intrinsic repudiation of the socialization of blood siblinghood under the banner of Western ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Relying on the socially bestowed authority of natural parents in the private sphere (and their replacements in the social sphere, as though those replacements were likewise natural) ensures the dominance of social brotherhood as an ideal while natural brotherhood can go on the rampage unnoticed (or deplored only as the absence of vertical authority) because it is given no social place.

Likewise, because of our preoccupation with vertical relationships we believe that it is parents and their substitutes who must restrict children's violence. We also argue that violence is primarily against the authority figure who has the power – the mother, father or teacher. Yet, of course, in schools, in South Sea island children's republics, boys fight each other and girls get their own back. I believe we have minimized or overlooked entirely the threat to our existence as small children that is posed by the new baby who stands in our place or the older sibling who was there before we existed. There follows from this an identification with the very trauma of this sense of nonexistence that will be ‘resolved’ by power struggles: being psychically annihilated creates the conditions of a wish to destroy the one responsible for the apparent annihilation. This plays out as stronger against weaker; larger, smaller; boy, girl; paler, darker. In adult wars we defeat, kill and rape our peers. However, ironically, it is in societies based on the social contract of brotherhood that these activities are not laterally controlled. Our social imaginary can envisage only vertical authority. Our image of a South Sea island republic of children is Lord of the Flies: boys’ interactive mayhem and murder.

Behind the social contract ideal of brotherhood dependent on the absence of lateral controls lies the tyrant brother. Looking laterally changes the analysis. No one in their right mind could have believed that the construction of a great empire would depend, or indeed be in the slightest degree enhanced by the destruction of a disparate population labelled ‘Jews’ – why did so many people believe it could? Why does the playground bully get support for his redundant act of picking on a harmless victim? The victim does not represent a tyrant's hidden vulnerability as is usually understood, but rather some traumatic eradication of his very being which can only be restored by manic grandiosity: there is only room for me. Then the tyrant/bully's followers are ‘empty of themselves’ in a shared eradication of selves with the empty but grandiose tyrant/bully: a trauma is induced. In the manic excitement of the rhetoric of tyranny, individual identities and judgements vanish until all become as one. The ‘original’ moment, replicated endlessly if not resolved, is when the sibling or imagined sibling replaces one – when there is another in one's place. Bullied victims, madly, are imagined to be standing in the bully/tyrant's place. Others support the crazy vision because somewhere they too can call on this ‘universal’ trauma of displacement/replacement.

The desperate grandiosity of the tyrant self and visions of empire contain both the sexuality and violence that mask the self-love and the need to preserve it in its endangered moment. However, as children have found, only the proper social organization of siblings/peers can countermand the continued living out of the unresolved trauma of the tyrant/bully's endless moment of experienced annihilation – a sisterhood and brotherhood in which there is room for equality of dignity and rights. Looking at siblings is looking anew at sex and violence. Bringing in siblings changes the picture we are looking at.

— 1 —

Siblings and Psychoanalysis: an Overview

This is a strange time to be insisting on the importance of siblings. Globally, the rate of increase of the world's population is on the decline; in the West it is mostly below the point of replacement.1 China, with over a fifth of the world's population, is trying to make its ‘one child’ family policy prevail – with considerable success in urban centres. Will there be any (or anyway, many) siblings in the future?

Yet this book argues that siblings are essential in any social structure and psychically in all social relationships, including those of parents and children. Internalized social relationships are the psyche's major elements. More particularly, the work here considers that siblings have, almost peculiarly, been left out of the picture. Our understanding of psychic and social relationships has foregrounded vertical interaction – lines of ascent and descent between ancestors, parents and children. During the larger part of the twentieth century the model has been between infant and mother; before that it was child and father. Now we learn that such concerns as parental (particularly step-paternal) sexual and violent abuse have hidden from us the extent of sibling outrages (Cawson et al. 2000). Why have we not considered that lateral relations in love and sexuality or in hate and war have needed a theoretical paradigm with which we might analyse, consider and seek to influence them? I am not sure of the answer to this question; I am sure we need such a paradigm shift from the near-exclusive dominance of vertical comprehension to the interaction of the horizontal and the vertical in our social and in our psychological understanding. Why should there be only one set of relationships which provide for the structure of our mind, or why should one be dominant in all times and places? Even if there will be fewer full siblings in the world, there will still be lateral relationships – those relationships which take place on a horizontal axis starting with siblings, going on to peers and affinal kin. In polygynous societies, in social conditions with high rates of maternal mortality, or with divorce and remarriage or serial coupling, half-siblings will persist.