My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend

Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds

Dorothy Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136592256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Stories about siblings abound in literature, drama, comedy, biography, and history. We rarely talk about our own siblings without emotion, whether with love and gratitude, or exasperation, bitterness, anger and hate. Nevertheless, the subject of what it is to be and to have a sibling is one that has been ignored by psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists.

In My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend, Dorothy Rowe presents a radically new way of thinking about siblings that unites the many apparently contradictory aspects of these complex relationships. This helps us to recognise the various experiences involved in sibling relationships as a result of the fundamental drive for survival and validation, enabling us to reach a deeper understanding of our siblings and ourselves.

If you have a sibling, or you are bringing up siblings, or, as an only child, you want to know what you're missing, this is the book for you.

Chapter 1

Our Greatest Need: Our Greatest Fear

For all of his life the great painter Henri Matisse dreaded falling asleep. He said: ‘I am inhabited by things that wake me, and don’t show themselves.’¹

In her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir described a night in her teens when she was in conflict with her parents:

One night, just as I had laid myself to sleep in a vast country bed, I was overwhelmed by a terrible anguish; I had on occasion been terrified of death, to the point of tears and screams; but this time it was worse. Life was already tilting over the brink into absolute nothingness; at the instant I felt a terror so violent that I nearly went to knock on my mother’s door and pretend to be ill, just in order to hear a human voice. In the end I fell asleep, but I retained a horrified memory of that awful attack of nerves.²

Matisse’s demons and Simone de Beauvoir’s terror arose from the fear of becoming absolute nothingness, that is, the dissolution of the carefully constructed entity which we call ‘I’. We all fear death but we can imagine ‘I’ continuing on in some form – our soul, our spirit, our children, our work, other people’s memories – but to feel that ‘I’ is falling apart, disappearing, that is absolute terror.

We create all kinds of defences against this terror, but when we fall asleep the defences melt away. If our life is going along steadily, turning out to be what we expect it to be, then the terror recedes into the far distance. But when our life is not proceeding steadily, when the ‘I’ constructed by the brain out of our experiences cannot fit easily with what our world presents to us, our ‘I’ begins to crumble and we cast around for stronger, more effective defences to hold ourselves together. However, while the threat remains, no matter how good our defences are, they require our constant attention. If the ill fit between our ‘I’ and our world arises from our current circumstances – an unhappy marriage, an unsuitable job, being caught up in a war – we may be able to leave the marriage or the job, or extricate ourselves from the war, and thus find ourselves enjoying serenity again. But if the mismatch began in our childhood the threat remains with us no matter where we go and what we do, and the defence endlessly necessary. For Matisse and Simone de Beauvoir the mismatch began at birth.

Matisse was born in 1869 into a family of generations of weavers in northern France just as that area was undergoing industrialisation. As a child all around him was ‘the remorseless, mind-numbing, drudgery of the weavers and farm labourers.’ His ambitious father, Hippolyte Henri, escaped such drudgery by starting a seed merchant business but drove himself, his wife and his sons exceedingly hard in order to succeed. Their second son died when he was two and Matisse four. A third son, August Emile, was born in 1872. Hippolyte Henri expected much from his sons, but especially from Matisse as the elder boy. Had Matisse not had a younger brother, his father would likely have treated him all the more harshly and demanded more from him. As a schoolboy Matisse had periods of illness which look suspiciously like a useful defence against the more unpleasant aspects of his life, particularly the sheer hard labour involved in the seed merchant business. His brother August Emile did this work in Matisse’s place. Without him Matisse might not have been able to leave his family and go to Paris to study art. Fortunately for him, and for us, August Emile was prepared to go into their father’s business. Appalled as he was at his son’s defection, his father very grudgingly gave Matisse a small allowance, but Matisse’s community never forgave him. Hilary Spurling, Matisse’s biographer, wrote, ‘It would be hard to exaggerate the shock of Matisse’s defection in a community which dismissed any form of art as an irrelevant, probably seditious and essentially contemptible occupation to be indulged in by layabouts, of whom the most successful might at best be regarded as a clown.’³

Matisse changed how we see the world, and so it is hard for us today to understand the almost universal contempt which Matisse’s paintings provoked. He, his wife Amélie and their children lived in poverty for many years. Matisse could have made an excellent living if he had painted conventionally, but he could not betray his ‘I’, the person he knew himself to be.

As a small child Simone de Beauvoir was a delight to her parents. She was very bright, she loved her little sister Poupette, and she was good. In her early years she had been prone to temper tantrums, but when the Germans invaded France in 1914, ‘It had been explained to me that if I were good and pious God would save France.’ The chaplain at the Cours Désir congratulated her mother ‘upon the radiant beauty of my soul’.⁴ However, she was too clever and too observant not to see that the adults who judged her did not set the same high standards for themselves as they did for her. In her teens and writing about an argument with her parents she said, ‘I tried to pretend, to lie, to give soft answers, but I did it all with ill grace: I felt I was a traitor to myself. I decided that I must “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”: in that way I would avoid disguising and at the same time betraying my thoughts. This was not very clever of me, for I merely succeeded in scandalising my parents without satisfying their curiosity.’⁵ Her parents compared her unfavourably with her sister. ‘“Now, Poupette – she’ll find a husband,” my parents confidently predicted.’⁶

For both Matisse and Simone de Beauvoir there was an ill fit between the person they knew themselves to be and the world in which they lived, but they had two great advantages. One was that they each had a sibling who accepted (or in August’s case ‘put up with’ might be a better description) what the other was. The other was that they each had enormous talent out of which they could both construct a defence against the fear of being annihilated as a person and produce their works of art. After she had lost her Catholic faith Simone de Beauvoir made a decision about her future. She wrote:

If at one time I had dreamed of being a teacher it was because I wanted to be a law unto myself; I now thought that literature would allow me to realize this dream. It would guarantee me an immortality which would compensate me for the loss of heaven and eternity; there was no longer any God to love me, but I should have the undying love of millions of hearts. By writing a work based on my experience I would re-create myself and justify my existence.⁷

When Matisse married Amélie he warned her that, as much as he loved her, he would always love painting more. He worked almost incessantly. In great old age, when he no longer had the physical strength to paint, he cut brilliant shapes from coloured papers. There was always an enormous urgency behind his work. When in 1942 he was asked by Louis Aragon why he worked as he did, he answered simply, ‘I do it in selfdefence.’⁸

Neither Matisse nor Simone de Beauvoir was talking about a rare and special event. They were talking about the kind of events which inhabit our lives, that break in upon the quiet tenor of our days. We all know such events only too well. Suppose you are at home waiting for the person who gives shape, security and purpose to your life to arrive. The minutes tick by. The person does not come. You start to feel anxious and you comfort yourself with explanations, ‘held up at work,’ ‘traffic’s bad’, but such comfort soon evaporates. You feel a constriction in your chest, your palms become damp with sweat, images of accidents come into your mind. You try to divert yourself with little tasks but you cannot concentrate. You can hear your heart beating fast and the constriction in your chest turns into a fierce pain. You want reassurance that everything will be all right, but the only person who can give you this reassurance is the one you are waiting for. You can try to tell yourself that even if the very worst has happened you will manage, but you know you will not. Life will be meaningless and you will fall apart, just as you are falling apart now as the waves of fear sweep over you and swirl you about. You feel yourself breaking into pieces, falling apart like a porcelain vase shattered by a blow. Then the door opens and there is your beloved. There is a moment of stillness and then the fragments of you that were whirling chaotically come back together again. You are whole and safe.

Or suppose you hear on the office grapevine that the firm is going to be reorganised. You are part of a team that has worked together well for a long time. You are sure your boss thinks highly of you but perhaps you have got this wrong. There is a sudden stab of sharp pain in your chest and your heart starts racing. You try to chat to people but you cannot get your breath and your palms stick to whatever they touch. You go to your boss’s office as you would to an execution. When your boss delivers the blow by telling you that your team is being disbanded and your work is to be done by someone else, you do not take in his assurances that the references he will give you will praise you and that you will be certain to get another job very soon. How can you hear anything when you know that you are about to disappear like a puff of smoke in the wind? Your reflection in the mirror does not reassure you that you are still there. If all the people who are the structures that sustain you disappear, you will surely disappear too. You try to be sensible, be practical, get busy, but no amount of activity will extinguish the terror you feel.

Perhaps you have been going along quietly, your life unfolding in the way that you happily anticipated and then suddenly, without warning, something happens which shows you that your life is not what you think it is.

Michael Leunig is an Australian cartoonist whose work often asks the kind of questions which offend those people who believe that their views are absolutely right and must never be questioned by anyone else. Gentle soul that he is, Michael has made many enemies who may strike when he least expects it. After a Danish newspaper had published some cartoons which depicted the Prophet Mohammed a great many Muslims were outraged, and an Iranian newspaper started a competition for cartoons which made fun of the Holocaust. One summer evening Michael was about to water his garden when a call from a colleague alerted him to the fact that one of his own cartoons had been sent to the Iranian cartoon competition. Later he wrote:

I went into the harsh light of the internet and there, on the Iranian website, as described to me on the telephone, was a well-worn cartoon of mine prominently displayed as the first entry in the famous international competition. Local boy makes good. Furthermore, a fake text bearing my name and expressing support for the Muslims of the world glared eerily before me on the screen. It was quite a sudden disillusionment.

There is a moment of confusion that is almost religious as the mind tumbles about grasping for meaning and reference points but, really, you are in free-fall at this moment and the stomach feels weightless for a time as you descend suddenly into a special underworld where you must now spend some unscheduled time.

This is what happens when the fact slams into me that I have been secretly and maliciously set up and framed and that the story will soon be on the wire and the twisting and distorting of my life is about to become extreme and that the consequences for me and my family could be dire.⁹

The Iranians who had organised the competition agreed to remove the cartoon and the forged text, and eventually all the media who had descended on Michael went away, but experiences like those described here always change us. Some people become stronger; some do not. Some people live in fear that the experience will happen again and they will not be strong enough to survive it. Some people feel that the experience has shown them that they cannot be the person they know themselves to be. They cannot fight back in the way that Matisse and Simone de Beauvoir did and so all that is left of them is a façade, a false self that other people acknowledge and talk to, but behind the façade is nothing, just a wraith, a ghost of what used to be. Many people live like this, feeling quite unable to present the person that they are to the world because to do so would invite yet another threat of annihilation. Many of these people feel that they no longer know who they really are. Some feel very guilty because they are not the person their family or their society expects them to be: others feel very resentful because other people have thrust a role upon them which is at odds with who they are. Surviving the threat of annihilation only to live as a façade leads to loneliness and great unhappiness.

It can also lead to physical illness. The unity of mind and body is now being demonstrated in the extensive research on the effects of troubling events on the efficient functioning of the immune system. In a review of this research Suzanne Segerstrom and Gregory Miller found that the ‘stressors’ which had the greatest physical effect were the chronic stressors, the ones that ‘pervade a person’s life, forcing him or her to restructure his or her identity or social roles’, where ‘the person does not know whether or when the challenge will end or can be certain that it will never end’. Studies of people suffering a chronic stressor such as ‘a traumatic injury that leads to physical disability, providing care for a spouse with severe dementia, or being a refugee forced out of one’s native country by war’, all situations where the person is no longer in control of his own life, showed: ‘The most chronic stressors were associated with the most global immunosuppression, as they were associated with reliable decreases in almost all functional immune measures examined.’¹⁰ Not being the person you know yourself to be makes you ill.

What adds to the stress of the threat of annihilation as a person is our reluctance to talk about it. When we survive the threat of physical death we often talk about the experience afterwards, but when we survive the threat of being annihilated as a person we usually tell no one. Sometimes a reference to our fear just slips out. When the television presenter Graham Norton was interviewed by Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs and she asked what luxury he wanted on his island he replied, ‘I’ve always said that the luxury I’d bring was a mirror. It would be quite good to save your sanity, that you could see that you exist, rather than just be kind of lost in the trees.’¹¹

Sometimes, in trying to explain what other people have called his ‘breakdown’, a person will give a description of how he experienced the near-annihilation of his sense of being a person. In a television programme about himself, Alastair Campbell, once director of communications for Tony Blair, did this. He said, ‘It’s like your mind is like a very fragile plate glass. And it’s very large, you’re trying harder and harder to hold this plate glass together. You can feel pressure on your mind and pressure on your body, and eventually it literally shatters, it explodes. It’s a kind of cacophony of noise and of memories and of music and of people talking and different conversations, and you’re trying to get some order into it, and you can’t.’¹²

However, most of the time we find the fear of annihilation far too terrible to talk about. We feel that, if we spoke of it, the fear we had felt might come back in all its ferocity. We do not want to remember that we had had such an experience many times in childhood. If we had siblings it was often one or other of them who delivered such blows.

Perhaps you were just three years old and often felt confused and frightened by so many things that you could not comprehend. People came and went and picked you up and put you down and no one explained what was happening and why. The only person you could rely on was your teddy bear. Holding him you felt safe and at night, when he was tucked in beside you, you knew he was keeping at bay all those things out there in the dark. Then one day your big brother who was so much taller, stronger and quicker than you grabbed your teddy from you and held him over the railing of a bridge below which flowed a deep, dark river. You screamed and screamed in fear. When your brother relented and lifted your teddy back over the railing and gave him to you, your screams turned to sobs and you could not be consoled. How could you be consoled when there was no you but little bits of you spinning about in chaos? These bits came together eventually but you were not the same as you were before your brother took your teddy from you. That experience had changed you.

Perhaps you had been an only child for four years. Your world was made up of Mummy, Daddy and you. Then Mummy and Daddy started to talk about the little baby that was in Mummy’s tummy and you had your hand there and felt the baby moving. You had seen some babies and they looked like dolls that moved. Then Mummy went away and came back with a baby. When Grandma took you into Mummy’s bedroom you got a shock. Mummy was in bed holding the baby and Daddy was sitting beside her with his arm around her and both of them were looking at the baby, and the way they were looking told you that they loved the baby more than you. Even though Mummy called you over and you sat on the bed with them, you knew that now they had the baby they did not want you. A gigantic empty space opened up inside you and you felt that you had disappeared for ever.

We do not forget such childhood experiences. We may try to forget them but, remembered or not, their effects are profound. Our security is undermined and we resort to defences that, like all defences, impede our progress.

The experience of our greatest fear, being annihilated as a person, has always been the stuff of great literature. Whatever t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Our Greatest Need: Our Greatest Fear
• 2. A Relationship Like no Other
• 3. Two Ways to Experience Existence
• 4. Competing to be Good
• 5. Power Struggles
• 6. The Death of a Sibling
• 7. A Question of Memory
• 8. Loyalty and Betrayal
• 9. A Lifelong Relationship
• Notes
• Index