BOOK REVIEW: A Group-Analytic Exploration of the Sibling Matrix: How Siblings Shape our Lives

By Val Parker (Routledge, 2020)
ISBN 9780367375843

Early on in this fascinating, thought-provoking book Parker notes that in the English language the word sibling is associated with rivalry, whereas sisterhood or brotherhood denotes warmth and closeness. Parker deftly moves between these ways of thinking about our sibling relationships, finding ways to theorise what at first sight may appear too amorphous, too full of both variety and particularity. Using pithy vignettes from her own clinical practice and from her own life, she draws the reader into an exploration of this neglected topic and makes a compelling case for analysts and therapists to pay much greater attention to it. She is predominantly concerned with groups and how they are peculiarly well-placed to explore these dynamics in real time, but I have already found myself paying much greater attention when my patients in my individual practice speak about their siblings.

As part of her bid to broaden out therapists’ thinking beyond the maternal dyad, Parker revisits Winnicott, so strongly associated with the mother/child relationship, and invites us to reread The Piggle, paying attention to the warm loving feelings that are expressed between first-born child and her new sister, as well as the more foregrounded rivalry. Parker argues that such foregrounding in the literature misses focusing on questions of identity and the massive shift in identity that the arrival of a new sibling brings. This focus on rivalry retains the relationship with the mother or parent as central (the vertical as she puts it), at the possible expense of considering the horizontal – the sibling relationships with their own complexity of competing dynamics, both forming and being formed by the matrix. She makes the point that the traditional notion of the child separating from the dyad with mother to the social group in nursery and school overlooks the rather obvious fact that children are born into the already social world of family: parents, siblings and others. And whereas questions of dependence and separation are often key to our theorising the parent child relationship, such a sense of progression does not exist within the sibling group; as Parker says, they have to be borne. It reminded me of my daughter talking about getting a flat with her sister. When I wondered how they would get on, she said “Well if we argue and fall out, it won’t break us like it could if we were friends, it will just be added to the pile”, illustrating at a stroke this significant difference between sibling relationships and any other. Returning to Winnicott, Parker suggests that his emphasis on play should also be taken as an invitation to include sibling relationships, again making what immediately seems the obvious point that it is amongst siblings where so much play takes place.

Parker wonders at this absence of siblings in the literature (Juliet Mitchell the notable exception) and, noting the difficulty for Foulkes of deviating from Freud’s lead, she draws our attention to the loss of Freud’s baby brother when Freud was two years old. She also considers this absence in the socio-political post-war context which placed mother firmly at the centre of family life. In our more interconnected world and where the nuclear family is increasingly seen as only one amongst many possible family configurations, Parker’s shift of emphasis is a welcome addition to analytic thinking. An omission that I noted, and, speculatively, may indeed be another reason for the absence of siblings in the analytic body of work, is that of sexuality. She does make a good case for thinking of oedipal dynamics occurring between siblings, as well as between child and parent, and mentions sibling incest in relation to an office affair, in her excellent if rather short chapter on sibling dynamics in organisations, but it feels peripheral. I wondered about sexuality as the missing link between the rivalrous siblings and the sisterly and brotherly love that are separated so sharply in our language, being a force that is beyond containment in either of those categories, a force that can fracture and disrupt, in families, in groups and in any other place where relationships form. I also found myself noticing that sibling is non-gender specific whereas the sisterhood demarcates itself as female, brotherhood as male. Thus, through language itself the possibility is removed of articulating a close, maybe too close relationship between the sexes.

Finally, a shout out to the publishers who provided me with a hard copy when I expressed a preference for it over the electronic version. The copy revealed in physical form the relative brevity of the book which I felt was a strength. I felt that I was there at the opening of a conversation, which left me buzzing with thoughts and observations, eager to join in.

Barbara Cawdron
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in South-East London and a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her work is predominantly with individuals, but she has developed a keen interest in groups, both running and teaching on them. She has two older brothers.