Siblings

Sex and Violence

Juliet Mitchell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

— 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.

It can and has been argued (Winnicott 1958) that it is essential we work out the problems of future social interaction with siblings in our early childhood. If we fail to overcome our desire for sibling incest or for sibling murder, will versions of these be more insistently played out with later lateral relationships, with peers and so-called equals – in love and in war? Freud argued that in order to marry our wife we need to know in childhood that we cannot marry our mother (the Oedipus complex).² I suggest that at the very least we also need to know we cannot marry our sister if we are to be able to marry our sister's (not just our mother's) psychological successor. But do we in fact marry someone who resembles in some way our sister or brother? It has been suggested that the ideal situation for a successful heterosexual relationship involves a mixture of prohibited incestuous wishes from childhood for someone who is not too like the original infantile love-object and the contemporary adult desire for someone who is like oneself, but not too alike. We often hear it said that she's married her father (mother) – is it not, perhaps, that we have married a sibling? Similarly, the literature emphasizes the Oedipal desire to kill the father – do we predominantly kill fathers or brothers?

How can we assess the relative importance of our vertical love or hate for our parents and our lateral emotions for our siblings? In wars we fight side by side with our brothers – not our fathers: the resolution of fraternal love and hate would seem to underlie whom we may and may not kill. It was widely noted in the First World War that ‘fraternal’ loyalty was essential for success – and, as the poet Wilfred Owen described, the killed enemy is also a brother. What happens between siblings – full, half or step, or simply unborn but always expected because everyone fears to be dethroned in childhood – is a core experience of playmates and peers. What Lévi-Strauss calls the ‘atom of kinship’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963) has siblings as its centre-point; it is this atom which concerns me here. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the Oedipal and the vertical, has had an influence well beyond its own bounds. I wish to add the lateral axis to the psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical perspective. I am also interested in how this maps on to the theories of group behaviour and to social psychology more generally.

Recently I was talking to a group of clinical psychologists and psychotherapists about the place of siblings in their work. I told an anecdote and asked a question: ‘The World Service of the BBC has reported that the southern Indian state of Kerala has announced an extensive expansion of child and baby-care services. Why might it have done this?’ Comforting to the feminist in me, everyone in the audience answered that it would be to enable more mothers to join the workforce. This had been my own immediate assumption. In fact, it was so that, in a state with an extraordinarily high rate of literacy to maintain, girls could go to school. Apparently literacy rates had been falling because sisters had to stay at home to care for younger siblings. Once more I was struck by the ethnocentricity of our exclusion of siblings from a determinate place in social history and in the psychodynamics both of individuals and of social groups. Confirming this ethnocentricity, it comes as a shock to the Western imagination to learn of the extent of ‘child-headed’ households in AIDS-struck sub-Saharan Africa.

The proposition here is this: that an observation of the importance of siblings, and all the lateral relations that take their cue from them, must lead to a paradigm shift that challenges the unique importance of understanding through vertical paradigms. Mothers and fathers are, of course, immensely important, but social life does not only follow from a relationship with them as it is made to do in our Western theories. The baby is born into a world of peers as well as of parents. Does our thinking thus exceed the binary?

There is a second hypothesis, more tentative than the first, and this is that the dominance or near-exclusiveness of our vertical paradigm has arisen because human social and individual psychology has been understood from the side of the man. Looking at my own field of research, psychoanalysis, I have found a striking overlap between the concepts that explain femininity in the main body of the theory and concepts that we need if we are to incorporate siblings. Here, I will simply offer indicators. Sibling relations prioritize experiences such as the fear of annihilation, a fear associated with girls, in contrast to the male fear of castration. They involve fear of the loss of love which is usually associated with girls; an excessive narcissism which needs to be confirmed by being the object, not subject, of love. Siblings and femininity have a similar overlooked destiny.

Psychoanalysis, like all grand theories, has followed the pattern of assuming an equation between the norm and the male. The paradoxical result is that the male psyche is taken for granted and invisible. The current feminist challenge to this ideology means that masculinity is emerging as an object of enquiry. An examination of siblings and sibling relationships will bring both genders into the analytical picture. The sibling, I believe, is the figure which underlies such nearly forgotten concepts as the ego-ideal – the older sibling is idealized as someone the subject would like to be, and sometimes this is a reversal of the hatred for a rival. It can be an underlying structure for homosexuality. Siblings help too with the postmodern concern with the problem of Enlightenment thinking in which sameness is equated with the masculine and difference with the feminine. Postmodern feminism has been concerned to demonstrate that a unity such as is suggested by something cohering as ‘the same’ is only achieved by ejecting what it doesn't want of itself as what is different from it. The masculine unity is achieved at the cost of expelling the feminine as other or different. Brothers cast out sisters or the feminine from their make-up.

For beneath the surface of this argument for the structuring importance of laterality, one can see the shift from modernism to postmodernism and from causal to correlative explanations. In the possible link to siblings of explanations of the sameness/difference axis of masculinity and femininity one sees then the role of feminism (and the increasing ‘sameness’ in the roles of women and men) as promoting laterality over verticality. Social changes underpin the shift. For instance inheritance depends on the vertical but it is said to be on the decline, with stickers on pensioners’ cars in Florida reading ‘We are spending your inheritance’ indicating a trend. If, despite the feminization of poverty, women can be self-supporting through paid work, then the woman provides her own equivalent of what was once endowment. At this stage these thoughts are no more than speculative lines of enquiry that would seem to merit further investigation. They do, however, suggest a decline of the importance of descent and a rise of the importance of alliance.

Hysteria and siblings

The chapters of the book that follow emanate from a long study of hysteria predominantly from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis.³ This study was also fuelled by a second-wave feminist interest in the hysteric as a proto-feminist (Clement 1987; Cixous 1981; Hunter 1983; Gallop 1982; and others), a woman whose hysteria was the only form of protest available under patriarchy (Showalter 1987, 1997). Rather than studying the feminists’ hysteric, I have long been interested in male hysteria. The presence of male hysteria (along with an analysis of dreaming) enabled Freud to found psychoanalysis as a theory built on the observation of universally present unconscious processes which were largely brought into being by social obstacles to the expression of human sexuality. Most obviously, we have all taken on board that we must not commit incest – the hysteric in all of us wants to do just that, wants to do whatever is not allowed. The hysterical symptom such as hysterical blindness, fatigue, immobility or aspects of some eating disorders, once understood, reveals both the illicit sexual desire and the prohibition against it that the hysteric does not wish to recognize. Cross-culturally and historically, hysteria has been associated almost exclusively with women. Male hysteria (charted by Charcot in the latter half of the nineteenth century and analysed by Freud, who had studied with him) demonstrated that these processes did not belong to a specific population – not to ‘degenerates’ (as was commonly thought in the nineteenth century) nor to the sick nor to women. Through the awareness of male hysteria at the end of the nineteenth century it could be seen that the symptoms of hysteria were the writing large of ordinary and universal processes. The exaggerations of neuroses show us the psy-chopathologies of everybody's everyday life.

However, once the universality of unconscious processes was demonstrated, hysteria as a diagnosis shifted. It was no longer considered an illness the extremes of which throw into relief the normative; rather it came to be considered an aspect of a personality – and predominantly a feminine personality. Roughly 70 per cent of those suffering from ‘Histrionic Personality Disorder’ (according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III) in the United States are women. Hysteria has become an aspect or expression of the feminine personality. We constantly come full circle with the collapse of the hysteric into the woman and femininity into the hysterical.

While hysteria had receded as an illness diagnosis, it was still easy in my psychoanalytic clinical work to observe hysteria as something more than (or as well as) a personality disorder. Hysteria had long ceased to be a common diagnosis (Brenman 1985), but in social and political life continuance and prevalence of the (colloquial) term seemed justified. These two factors led me to look not only historically but also ethnographically. There seemed no doubt that hysteria was, and always had been, a universal potential – all of us can have hysterical symptoms or act hysterically or, if this performance becomes a way of life, or these symptoms persist, be hysterics. The question then became, why, if it was possible for men, was it everywhere and at all times associated with women?

The psychoanalytic explanation of what we might term the refeminization of hysteria after its initial recognition in men is in terms of the importance of the phase of the pre-Oedipal mother-attachment of girls. A ‘law’ emanating from the place of the father (Lacan 1982a, 1982b) abolishes the Oedipal desires of the child for the mother (Oedipus’ love for his mother-wife, Jocasta). The law which threatens symbolic castration (the castration complex) prohibits phallic mother-love. The result differentiates the sexes – both are subject to the castration threat if the law is flouted, but the girl will never come to stand in the place of the father in relation to a mother substitute. Instead she must change her stance – she must become as though in the position of the mother and object of her father's love. The girl must relinquish her mother as object of her love and become instead like her. In an ‘idealized’ normative world, she then tries to win her father's love to replenish the narcissistic wound of being forever without the phallus which is what her mother, who lacks it, therefore desires. Flouting the law, the hysterical girl persists in both believing she has this phallus for her mother (a masculine stance, the phallic posture of the hysteric) and at the same time complaining she is without it (the feminine stance, the empty charm and constant complaint of the hysteric) and must receive it from her father.

This classic interpretation has received many new emphases and, indeed, additions. I was interested in the fact that if the propensity to hysteria was claimed as a ‘universal’ (or ‘transversal’ – omnipresent but in various forms), what features did its different manifestations have in common? The hysteric is always both too much there and insufficiently present – moving between grandiosity and psychic collapse. How does this expression fit with the psychoanalytic interpretation? I suggest that the hysteric – male or female – dramatizes an assumed phallic position, and at the same time believes that he or she has had the penis taken away, which in its turn means he or she has nothing. So she appears simultaneously hugely potent and horribly ‘empty’. She not only introjects phallic potency as though in her mind it were an actual penis, she also feels empty because in not having ‘lost’ anything, she has no inner representation of it. Despite appearing phallic, she oscillates between an ‘empty’ masculine position in relation to her mother and an empty feminine position in relation to her father; ‘empty’ because she has neither internalized the ‘lost’ mother nor accepted the ‘lost’ phallus. Her craving for both is compulsive and incessant. In both aspects of the situation she reveals that she has not understood a symbolic law – she believes (like many readers of psychoanalytic theories) that the phallus, present or absent, is an actual real penis. She thus endlessly seduces as though in this way she will get the real penis. What is also at stake in this is the question of narcissistic love (love for oneself) and so-called ‘object love’ (love for another). I shall return to this question as I believe it cannot be grasped without introducing sibling relations. In fact all these expressions of hysteria need the sibling to explain them. But another factor – the acknowledgement of male hysteria – also of itself calls into question the exclusively vertical, intergenerational explanation.

Male hysteria has seemed unlikely in a commonsensical way. The Western name for the condition is related to the Greek for womb, and many nineteenth-century doctors objected to male hysteria on exactly these grounds. However, this has no bearing on psychic life: men imagine they have wombs and that they do not have penises. The male hysteric believing in his power to conceive and carry and give birth is experiencing a delusion. There can therefore be a psychotic element in male hysteria which in turn entails it being considered as ‘more serious’. But believing he has a womb or does not have a penis also puts the male hysteric in a feminine position – and that is mostly where he has found himself in the diagnosis. Male hysteria has been repudiated along with a repudiation of femininity. A strange equation emerges: male hysteria is feminine so that it is its maleness which is cancelled out; the femininity becomes the illness. In the 1920s, the British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote a case history of a female patient whose femininity (or ‘womanliness’) was a masquerade (Riviere [1929]); some decades later, Jacques Lacan wrote that femininity itself was a masquerade (Lacan 1982a, 1982b). Masquerading is crucial to hysteria, but it is different if one is dressing up in femininity or if femininity itself is fancy dress.

The hysteric must dress up – feeling empty, he needs clothes to ensure his existence – but if he chooses femininity, while still remaining the subject of desire, this femininity will make use of the whole body as though the body were a phallus – the femininity itself will thus be phallic. If he chooses masculinity as the masquerade its phallic posturing will seem no less inauthentic for being paraded by a male. However, what is established in all these Oedipal accounts of hysteria is the importance of unconscious sexuality arising from the failure to fully repress incestuous Oedipal desires. This will raise a crucial question when we come to consider siblings. There is, nevertheless, a second strand in definitions of hysteria which I believe also indicates that we must implicate siblings. This is the importance of trauma. Since Charcot, trauma had been considered crucial in the aetiology of male hysteria; as understandings of hysteria always refeminize it, the traumatic element has been largely forgotten.

When Jean-Marie Charcot announced the prevalence of male hysteria in his huge public clinic, the Salpetrière, in Paris, he also added a new dimension to its aetiology. He claimed there was nothing effeminate about his male hysterics; they were responding with nonorganic physical symptoms (hence hysterical symptoms) to some trauma – an accident at work or on the train, a fight on the street, and so on. In the First World War the similarity of the symptoms of male war victims who had no actual injuries and the symptoms of classical female hysterics confirmed this possibility. However, the relationship between trauma and hysteria has remained unresolved (Herman 1992) and is a subject in its own right. My intention here is different. In brief, I would contend that there is a difference between traumatic neurosis (as war hysteria came to be called) and hysteria, but that it is not a difference between the absence or presence of a trauma. Usually the distinction is made that the trauma of traumatic neurosis is actual and real and that of hysteria rather a fantasy of trauma. I put the situation differently. In both cases there is trauma. In traumatic neurosis the trauma is in the present, in hysteria it is in the past. In hysteria this forgotten past trauma is constantly revived through re-enactment – one does make a drama of a crisis. Minor present-day obstacles to getting what one wants are treated as traumatic – but once upon a time, in the hysteric's early childhood, the result of such obstacles was in fact traumatic.

What is trauma? A residual definition is that it is a breaking through of protective boundaries in such a violent (either physical or mental) way that the experience cannot be processed: the mind or body or both are breached, leaving a wound or gap within. What is it which in time fills this gap that trauma opens up? Imitating the presence or object which has created the hole in the body or psyche is crucial. If, for instance, in fantasy, one murders the father and one then becomes like the dead father, it seems to act to fill the gap. Hysteria is definitionally mimetic, imitating a range of mental and bodily conditions. It thus, like a chameleon, takes on the colour of its surroundings, appearing for instance as eating disorders in the ‘thin’ cultu...