Introduction

On a recent visit to see my aunt Joan, who was celebrating her 100th birthday, we were talking about one of her younger sisters, Bina, now 98 years old, who had gone to live in a nursing home. “She was always able to make friends easily”, said Joan, “as early as I can remember. I was never like that.” And not for the first time, Joan went on to tell me how Bina, as a newcomer to the single-room rural Irish primary school that the older Joan had spent the previous two years establishing her school friendships in, “breezed in full of life and everyone seemed to love her. All my friends were around her and after that it seemed like none of the girls were a bit bothered about me.” Although I had heard this story before, I was still moved and amazed by the enduring and contradictory feelings this elderly woman had about her sister: the sense of being robbed of something that was hers; the outrage and sadness of displacement by another; the affection, aggression and dependency. “I often used to give her a wallop”, Joan continued, “She could talk to anyone whereas I was a bit shy. It was always great fun to go to a dance with Bina.” Deeply felt questions of identity wove around Joan's relationship with the woman who would always remain her younger sister, although she was nearly 100 years old herself.

In this chapter, I want to take a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial approach to think a bit more deeply about trouble between siblings, and to focus in particular on aggression and conflict between sisters. I will draw on work from psychoanalytic theorists including Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and Donald Winnicott, contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers whose focus is on relationships and relating (Bollas, 1987; Layton, 2008), and current research in the growing field of sibling studies (Dunn and Munn, 1986; Edwards et al, 2006; Punch, 2008) to locate aggression as central in relationships and in relating – with the self and with others. This will, in part, take in the highly influential Freudian idea that aggression and violence between siblings arises because they are always and inevitably rivalrous.