This is the first time I have read a recently published book with a sense that I am reading something on its way to being a psychoanalytic classic. Mitchell writes with the clarity of someone who has been digesting her material for a long time and the thinking of her earlier Siblings (Polity Press, 2003) has been significantly developed.
The essential idea is that a baby experiences what she calls a ‘sibling trauma’ when the arrival of a younger sibling pushes it out if its place as ‘the baby’ in the family into the role of ‘toddler’ – with the potential for murderous sibling rivalry being prevented by a taboo on killing, enforced under the ‘Law of the Mother’.
That very quick summary would probably invite the response of ‘So what?’ She quotes Freud's Constructions in Analysis ‘up to the nth year you regard yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment’ (pp. 78–79). The idea of sibling rivalry is not new. But she flags up the possibility that this is something we've tended to shortchange.
More formally, Mitchell suggests that we should be thinking horizontally (within generations) as well as vertically (between them). She suggests that whereas the incest taboo falls under the ‘Law of the Father’, a taboo on (sibling) murder falls under the ‘Law of the Mother’. In Siblings, Mitchell had posited the latter, in a gentle dig at Lacan's ‘Law of the Father’, but the actual term is a little problematic in that it also sounds as if it is applied vertically across the generations. I find myself thinking instead of the infant struggling to engage with ‘Who am I in relation to what is around me?‘ – which includes the possibility of killing rivals – but extends much more widely.
But there is a significant difference. Mitchell writes:
The pre-Oedipal male child has not taken any suggestion of the possibility of being castrated too seriously. The possibility and
Page 78the terrible shock are supposed to come when he discovers that his mother does not have a penis. From there it is to the terror and horror of all women being ‘castrated’. His father's threat of castration becomes all too plausible – it has happened to over half the world (p. 37).
The ‘traumatic’ aspect of this is only implied. But the actual discovery that one has lost one's place to a younger sibling is an actual and genuine loss. The term ‘trauma’ is spot on: how does a child make sense of this? She argues that this is a larger and more fundamental trauma.
This begs the question of what happens to people without younger siblings. Mitchell suggests that the same mechanisms apply. The story of a baby discovering it has been displaced by a new arrival as it transitions to being a toddler is a way of describing the concept, but the trauma may be more fully described as a growing infant's discovery that it is no longer a baby. Mitchell talks of this in terms of the installation of a ‘social unconscious’ – a baby's discovery that it is part of a social system. The ages imply a parallel with Melanie Klein's writing about an infant's achieving the depressive position, but Klein tends to write in terms of the relationship between the infant and the mother – Mitchell's point is around the arrival of the social.
By way of illustration, my mind jumps to the Balinese Nyambutin (‘earth touching’) ceremony, in which a baby, having been carried for its first months, finally touches the ground, and makes the transition into being part of the community. Although the Balinese understanding is complex, weaving many understandings and practices together, I wonder whether the ‘earth touching’ ceremony should be read as pivoting between two anxieties around death – from protecting parents against their own grief if the baby dies in its highly vulnerable early months to protecting the child against losing parents by linking it into the wider community (bearing in mind that this ceremony grew up before the arrival of modern medicine and stable food supplies). The gentle implication is that a Western focus on nuclear families might be a relatively new arrival in human functioning. It's also interesting that this ceremony – echoing
Mitchell's idea of the installation of a social unconscious – separates the mother-baby pair and links the infant and society without relying on the intervention of the father (unless one thinks of the ‘symbolic father’ in more abstract terms than usual).
What's exciting to me about Fratriarchy is that it has prompted me to think more horizontally in all my clinical work: partly about the impact of people's siblings, and partly about the impact of their parents' siblings on their parents, but also from a broader perspective. One of Mitchell's illustrations that I think I've seen echoed clinically is in the question of adultery: how far does this make sense as an adult's response to an actual rival, and how often does it make more sense as that adult getting in touch with what might have been around for them as a small child, afraid of being displaced (and not understanding what was going on)? This seems particularly relevant when the fear that someone's partner is having an affair is vastly greater than the actual evidence. Mitchell suggests that there's a recapitulation of the sibling trauma when someone reaches puberty, which gives an extra way to think about what emerges in this stage of life.
Thinking horizontally also relates to the fact that in an analytic practice we have a succession of separate one-to-one relationships with fellow analysands in sibling positions. The existence of others may be acknowledged consciously when an appointment is not available (perhaps another analysand has it), but they will also feature in the unconscious of analyst and analysands. What does it mean when one says the same thing to two different analysands, or weighs up the possibility and choses not to?
Mitchell offers a set of reflections on the horizontal axes in the work of three psychoanalytic thinkers: Winnicott, Bion and Pontalis. She points out that Bion writes little about early childhood development, but offers a great deal of thinking around groups. I suspect some of his unusual perspective comes from spending his first seven years in India: it's said that, when he first read the Mahabharata as an adult, he recognised the stories from those told to him by his Indian nurse, with the implication that a different, and more horizontal, way of thinking had got under his
skin. Mitchell talks of the rawness of the unconscious content he describes in terms of basic assumptions, and I find myself wanting to push that a little further and think of basic assumptions in relation to psychoanalytic work: how far it makes sense to think of the analyst and analysand in terms of basic assumption pairing within a wider system, which invites consideration of how an analyst navigates themselves in relation to the position of the one depended on in basic assumption pairing, and how far ‘resistance’ might also be basic assumption fight/flight. Gordon Lawrence's idea of basic assumption me-ness (that the group doesn't exist), or Earl Hopper's extension of that into basic assumption incoherence, aggregation, massification, offer a helpful addition, as a way of thinking about some of this at a less metabolised level (I am thinking of Richard Morgan Jones' descriptions of these as protomental). This doesn't offer a tidy framework for thinking the consequences of the sibling trauma, but keeps it open for exploration.
Mitchell's nod to Winnicott is fascinating. She draws attention to multiple instances of his case histories making mention of the existence of siblings, but of his paying surprisingly little attention to what he has observed. She makes the tentative suggestion that his not paying sufficient attention to the sibling aspect might be to do with the trauma of him losing so many of his fellow soldiers in the First World War. The hypothesis is credible, but her tentativeness also holds open the possibility of additional causes – I find myself thinking in terms what was going on around that war and the under-stated social tensions which meant the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 sparked conflict covering (at least) two world wars.
War itself is an all-too-familiar part of human history. Mitchell suggests that the prohibition on sibling murder under the ‘Law of the Mother’ is what breaks down when conflict begins, which I am finding offers an additional way to think about what is going on in how we think about war today – most obviously in what is being projected onto the conflict in and around Gaza. Culturally and politically, in thinking horizontally, Mitchell might also be helping us to think of Western culture as one among many sibling cultures in the world: the toddler's 'narcissistic-
psychotic' position might be a helpful way of thinking of some of the ramifications of this in contemporary politics.
I should add a postscript. One of the things I took from Siblings was a sense that I had been thinking too narrowly of the Lacanian imaginary. Reading Fratriarchy I have Lacan's discourses and sexuation formula at the back of my mind. I've been wondering whether there is something here that Fratriarchy might be encouraging me to think about differently: are these too vertical, or the building blocks might already be there? In rethinking what Freud does with the Oedipus myth in Seminar 17, Lacan talks in terms of four discourses – the master discourse and what it sets in motion. In Television and the Milan lecture he posits perverse forms of these in which the positions of agent and truth are reversed. Less formally, I've heard these described as attempts to deny lack and as attempts to escape castration. The latter reading might be a helpful way to think of a stage in a toddler's life when there is an awareness of other children, but very limited scope to symbolise them and therefore think about them. In conversation, Philip Boxer suggested clinicians doing one-to-one work found the four discourses of Seminar 17 sufficient, but the perverse forms become essential to think also about organisations. This is sounding very much like the shift from seeing psychoanalytic work vertically as a succession of separate one-to-one encounters to thinking more horizontally, with all analytic encounters happening within the ‘group that doesn't meet’ of the analytic practice and in relation to a wider social unconscious.
In conclusion, Fratriarchy has prompted me to think differently about the way in which I am working, thinking and writing, making it a profoundly generative book. It's one that deserves to be widely read.
Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother by is published by Routledge (2023), ISBN 9781032364407.