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In this ambitious undertaking, the psychologist Sue Kuba presents a detailed portrayal of her qualitative research study of women's experiences of their sister relationships and considers her findings in the context of the literature in four broad realms: characteristics of the sister relationship when one sister is disabled; experiences of lesbian women; gender roles and family relationships of women from a wide range of cultural and national backgrounds; and clinical theory from selected psychoanalytic, feminist, and family systems perspectives. Kuba's range of consideration is breathtaking, her efforts at integration across contents, methods, and philosophies herculean. The results, in the end, are mixed. The interview data are rich and thought-provoking, but her research approach lacks rigor and her analytic strategy is ill-suited to her aim of exploring the clinical implications of her findings. She identifies many aspects of the sister relationship that have not been adequately appreciated, but does not consider the existing literature on siblings, particularly the psychoanalytic literature, in sufficient depth. And though her efforts to integrate her findings with the literature are vigorous, they are limited in depth and scope by data that are both overly comprehensive and incomplete.
The book comprises three major sections. The first, “The Lifelong Relationship,” is devoted to a lengthy presentation (a good half of the book) of Kuba's qualitative research, for which she interviewed women about their relationships with their sisters. The opening chapter documents the absence of the sister relationship (and the sibling relationship more generally) from a range of psychoanalytic theories, as well as from relational cultural theory (especially the work of Jean Baker Miller); family therapy is also briefly considered. This absence of sisters is striking, as it spans theories developed by child analysts (e.g., Klein) and feminist thinkers (e.g., Miller). Kuba disc