All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Freud never theorized sibling relations. But in his paper, ‘A Childhood Recollection’, he focuses on a passage in Goethe’s memoir where the latter describes his pleasure at breaking the family crockery at the instigation of friends. Freud is convinced that for the incident to feature in Goethe’s memory, it must be linked to other matter that is screened from his view. Through a patient who had experience of the same rebellious behaviour, but timed with the birth of a sibling, Freud postulates that this might have been the case for Goethe, too. Dr Eduard Hitschmann gave Freud a list of Goethe’s siblings, together with notes:

  Goethe, too, as a little boy, saw a younger brother die without regret. At least, according to Bettina Brentano his mother gave the following account: ‘It struck her as very extraordinary that he shed no tears at the death of his younger brother Jakob who was his playfellow; he seemed on the contrary to feel annoyance at the grief of his parents and sisters. When, later on, his mother asked the young rebel if he had not been fond of his brother, he ran into his room and brought out from under the bed a heap of papers on which lessons and little stories were written, saying that he had done all this to teach his brother.’

  Throwing the crockery out on the street, smashing it, was for Goethe, as it was for Freud’s patient, Freud concludes, a magical act which gave violent expression to his wish to get rid of the little interloper.

  Pondering the tumult that the arrival of a new baby created in a sibling, Freud observed that the child grudged the ‘unwanted intruder and rival’ all the aspects of maternal care:

  It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother which often finds expression in a disagreeable change in its behaviour. It becomes ‘naughty’, perhaps, irritable and disobedient and goes back on the advances it has made towards controlling its excretions. All of this has been very long familiar and is accepted as self-evident; but we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor does it make much difference if the child happens to remain the mother’s preferred favourite. A child’s demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing.

  Yet, in time, many children do make accommodations and learn to love their siblings. The way love unfurls depends on any number of contingencies: from their own place in the family hierarchy to the new arrival’s nature and, indeed, to the parents’ absence and presence, as well as their actions and discourse about the children. Much of this complex nest of processes then shapes the child’s relations with the rest of the world.

  The early feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau, the sixth of eight children, was a frail child in a family of rambunctious boys and a scolding elder sister. When a baby sister was born, she recounts in her Autobiographical Memoir (1877), she resolved that ‘she would never want for the tenderness which I had never found’. Her little sister became a new life to her, on whom she could lavish love. Forty years on, she still remembered ‘lifting her out of her little crib, at a fortnight old, and the passionate fondness she felt for her, which has ever since “been unlike anything else”’. The child became ‘a pursuit’, as well as an ‘attachment’: through her, Martineau felt, as she told a young woman at the time, she could ‘see the growth of a human mind from the very beginning’.

  Simone de Beauvoir, after a first jealous phase, accommodated herself well to the fair and pretty sister, two-and-a-half years younger, whom the family nicknamed ‘Poupette’ or little doll. She convinced herself, with her parents’ help, that the advantages of being older were many. She had her own room, a big bed, and it was she who accompanied her mother when she went to visit her father doing military service. Ever aware of rankings, little Simone thought of Poupette as ‘secondary’, almost a superfluous being who was always, at school and at home, being compared unfavourably to her own pre-eminence. But her sister also provided an exemplary and docile playmate, one who was ever ready to take orders from Simone, and in their secret imaginary play would enact whatever role was allotted to her. Nearly a half-century on in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1959), de Beauvoir writes that she owes her sister a great debt: that of helping her ‘externalize many of my dreams in play’. Poupette also saved her ‘daily life from silence’. Through her, de Beauvoir took on the habit of wanting to communicate with people, a habit that stood her in good stead in her later teaching and writing life. In Poupette’s presence, too, words took on meaning, but not the gravity of deeds, which words with parents did. Recounting the day’s incidents and emotions to one another, ‘they took on an added interest and importance’. One could speculate that de Beauvoir’s later relationship with Sartre, grounded in the way they regularly ‘sifted’ each other’s experiences and ideas, had its origins in sisterly ways.

  In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud, ever emphatic about the jealousy of older siblings towards new arrivals, describes an early formative and intense quasi-sibling relationship with a nephew who was a year older than himself.

  Until the end of my third year, we had been inseparable, we had loved each other and fought each other, and this childhood relationship… had a determining influence on all my subsequent relations with contemporaries. Since that time my nephew John has had many re-incarnations, which revived now one side and now another of his personality, unalterably fixed as it was in my unconscious memory. There must have been times when he treated me very badly and I must have shown courage in the face of my tyrant… All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of that first figure… They have been ‘revenants’… My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual.

  Where some may re-enact early family bonds in a variety of constellations and splittings, other sibling ties may run so deep that in certain circumstances they stay together for life. In traditional societies it wasn’t unusual for unmarried or widowed sisters to set up home with siblings, either as adjuncts to their families or as part of a lifelong pair. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra remained her closest friend and confidante until her death. Charles Lamb and his older sister Mary formed a lifelong near-symbiotic couple and writing team. She was his ‘never-alienable’ friend. He took care of her after she murdered her mother in a fit of mania, and watched over her recurrent illnesses. She in turn ran their home and the vibrant literary salon they held, while tending to him when his alcoholism got the better of him.

  In societies where mothers died young leaving behind a brood of children, siblings often enough–and particularly, it seems, if they had been separated in childhood–formed abiding ties of love. The theme of sibling incest, of course, runs through Egyptian myth and history. In literature and recorded life, it seems to reach a peak in the Romantic moment. Two kindred souls unite, sometimes also in body, forming a love bond in which the natural world, raised to mystical heights, conspires. Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s bestselling Paul et Virginie, which Madame Bovary reads, tells the pastoral love story of two young people raised as siblings. Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, had a passionate affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and fathered a child by her, an episode which fuelled the secret past of his rakish hero Manfred, who longs for his Astarte. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great Whig historian and politician, was deeply attached to his two sisters, Margaret and Hannah. On 6 April 1831 he wrote to Margaret, ‘the affection which I bear to you and Hannah is the source of the greatest enjoyment I have in the world. It is my stronges
t feeling. It is that which will determine the whole course of my life.’ Margaret’s wedding not long after this letter so affected him that, even after a year had passed, he was writing to Hannah in terms of deep dismay. ‘Whether I am in London or Calcutta, she is equally lost to me. Instead of wishing to be near her, I rather shrink from it. She is dead to me, and what I see is only her ghost’ (23 December 1833).

  Shelley, who had no sisters, invented libidinal soulmates in The Cenci (1819) and Epipsychidion, where brother and sister unite in a transcendent union. This is the oceanic feeling raised to poetic heights.

  Let us become the overhanging day,

  The living soul of this Elysian isle,

  Conscious, inseparable, one…

  Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

  And our veins beat together; and our lips

  With other eloquence than words, eclipse

  The soul that burns between them, and the wells

  Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,

  The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

  Confus’d in Passion’s golden purity,

  As mountain-springs under the morning sun.

  We shall become the same, we shall be one

  Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

  One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew…

  William Wordsworth and his unmarried sister, Dorothy, created a comparable lived bond. Like Mary and Charles Lamb in their loyalty to one another and in their literary intermingling, the sibling psychology at work had its own pattern. The Wordsworths’ mother had died when Dorothy was seven and William eight. There were two younger brothers and another older one. Dorothy, the sole girl, was immediately sent off to live with relatives and never again saw her father, who died when she was twelve. Throughout that period she yearned to return to a home that took on increasingly idyllic proportions. Neither her mourning nor her profound longing was ever altogether acknowledged, and a sense of emptiness trailed her days, undermining her perception of her own value.

  When the siblings were reunited, at first only during the boys’ school holidays, William and Dorothy began to take on increasing importance for each other. Gradually, a symbiotic closeness developed, fuelled by their temperamental similarities, their conversations, their walks, their love of nature. When they set up house together in Grasmere, this in some measure reconstituted that early childhood home, for which both longed. The journal Dorothy kept was both a way of controlling her passionate nature, of subduing it, and of training herself, like a mystic, in the observation of the natural world around them. Her writing fed directly into her ‘beloved’ William’s poetry, which she, both muse and amanuensis, noted down and transcribed for him. Intimately bound to him, when William was away Dorothy felt a threatening void open up inside her. She longed for him, yearned, with the same ardour and reverence she had for the natural life around them. This yearning which looks forward is also nostalgia for a lost state; the absences of past and present are confounded.

  ‘It was a strange love,’ Virginia Woolf, who knew not a little about sibling patterns, notes in her essay on Dorothy:

  profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry. But one could not act without the other. They must feel, they must think, they must be together.

  In ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth describes something of the twinship that his sibling, as attuned to nature in their ramblings as he was and perhaps even more dedicated to precise observation, provided:

  For thou art with me here upon the banks

  Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

  My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

  The language of my former heart, and read

  My former pleasures in the shooting lights

  Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

  May I behold in thee what I was once,

  My dear, dear Sister!

  For William, arguably a great narcissist, Dorothy evokes facets of his former self: her response to the sublime aspects of nature is directly akin to his when he first experienced the scene.

  Sibling intimacy, emotionally if not actually incestuous, here takes on what Camille Paglia calls ‘a supersaturation of identity’: two become one, blend into one another, in an apogee of romantic love. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, as Frances Wilson, Dorothy’s biographer, notes, that the obsession with sibling incest in the culture of sensibility is ‘at some level related to a wish, not on the existential level of a desire for mating with actual relations, but on the level of memory and nostalgia for a primal state in which no revulsion from incestuous acts or longings was felt’. A nostalgic yearning for an originary home, a childhood oneness, underpins all romantic passion: the twinned souls of brother and sister may give it its ultimate expression.

  However, brother-and-sister merging is no easier to maintain in the quotidian than any other kind. The skewered power relations between a Dorothy, who is both vulnerably sensitive and ‘wild’, and her idealized poet brother call to mind, as Frances Wilson so aptly sees, the relations between Narcissus and Echo. Dorothy’s subordinate state, her inability to conduct an independent life, has a double effect on her ways of loving–one common enough to her time, but one which also still lingers on, despite our own moment of greater equality. On the one hand, like many mothers, she admirably deflects personal desires and aspirations into altruistic care: she lives for and through her brother, whose narcissism embraces her. But this means letting go of him so that he can court and eventually marry her friend Mary–a treacherous psychological business, leaving her alternately tied up in painful knots, then emptied out. Nor, in tandem, is it easy for him to throw off her controlling ties, both emotional and literary. After his marriage, some have argued, Wordsworth never again matched his greatest work.

  Dorothy’s sometimes hidden, sometimes open, resentments boiled over or burned inwardly. Tormented while he courted Mary, she suffered from terrible migraines, grew very thin and was repeatedly ill, sometimes in synchrony with William. Talented, by many accounts exceptional, she breaks down when William and Mary finally marry. Though she may lose herself, in her mad state the one thing she never forgets is William’s poetry. With few other social choices and fewer psychological ones open to her, Dorothy carried on living with her brother’s family and made herself indispensable, a veritable second wife to William. Idealizing her nephew, she took out her bitterness, it seems, on the niece that was named after her, undermining the girl’s evident intelligence and criticizing her pride, until this little woman, too, bowed under, and became yet another ‘wife’ in service to the adored family poet.

  Adult sibling love, libidinal if not overtly sexual, can, like other kinds of love, tumble into hate, acknowledged or obscured.

  In our own times, when siblings rarely cohabit during their elsewhere partnered lives, such passionate relations are rarer, though they may simmer beneath the surface. Older brothers rarely feel benevolent, at least at first, towards younger sisters’ admirers. Sisters, particularly in youth, replay childhood rivalries and often enough steal each other’s boyfriends. When parents are present, even with mature siblings, the intense emotions of childhood surface: this is what can make Christmas or other ritualized family gatherings such an ordeal. Infantilized once more in the company of parents, early patterns of jealousy, rivalry, envy and demands for love may resurface and erupt, taking everyone by surprise. The death of parents, the divvying up of possessions, exacerbate matters once more. A mother’s necklace, a father’s preferred painting, can take on a near-magical value, as aged toddlers scrabble over the relics of favouritism.

  Good-enough parenting, the kind that allows siblings to remain affectionate, extends well beyond the gr
ave and seems to demand the wisdom of Solomon.

  Grandparents

  If the family is the environment in which children first gather their sense of others–our earliest social space–then some sense of the rich palette of the real is a useful part of it. One of the reasons children so love their grandparents is that they introduce into the family an added vertical dimension, a sense of history and time, as well as a parent-plus.

  For parents, grandparents may present tricky terrain to negotiate, particularly as they grow older, crotchety and dependent. Lear-like they may still insist on their primacy, and the debts of love grow heavy. But for children they introduce a rich, new, sometimes usefully quirky element into family life. Grandparents can bring a breath of much desired freedom to children suffering from a sense of enclosure within the vigilant family nest.