Newsletter 2007

Brothers and Sisters:

Discovering the Psychology of Companionship

Lara Newton

New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books, 2007, 206 pp.

For the last twenty five years or so we have had access as a species to medical operations which can cosmetically change our appearance and even provide an ability to function sexually as a member of a sex we were not born into. Brave new world that has such people in it! More and more scientific and psychological evidence is piling up every year to suggest that gender identity is assigned and reinforced rather than innate and inescapable.

​​ Classical psychoanalysis proposes that gender is destiny and that mental health is a matter of being properly adjusted to your biological fate. Freudian theory wiggles and bends to explain how libido moves in particular gender-determined ways towards the contrasexual parent and prepares us for our heterosexual adult partners. Mature adult sexuality, then, consists of the renunciation of the grandiose, omnipotent wish “to have it all” and to be both sexes.

​​ Freudian analyst Lewis Aron proposes an alternative view and suggests that bisexuality, in the sense of containing the qualities of both sexes, is the innate psychological state. He sees the assumption of fixed gender identity as a sort of “splitting” which is followed by a primitive idealization of one sex and the parallel devaluation of and contempt for the other. This theory seems to describe traditional gender relations quite well.

​​ In Freudian theory then, once gender identity is properly established, gender relations are reconciled through the sexual relationship between men and women which, in the physical joining of bodies, symbolically represents the combining of the attributes assigned to the two sexes in a generative way.

​​ Jungian theory, on the other hand, with its emphasis on the multiple nature of our character, and through the concept of the archetypes, has always been more comfortable with the idea that we have access to all potential responses and patterns of behaviour regardless of what we have been trained to live on our cultural surface. Jungian theory normalizes the experience of inner contra-sexual parts through the concepts of Anima and Animus as compensatory “soul-images” which round out the personality. Even for Jungians, however, masculine and feminine are first and foremost described by the archetypes of Mother and Father. The archetype of Mother contains within it not just the typical positive and negative feminine attributes, but our relationship to the boundlessness of the unconscious and even our relationship to the planet. From the archetype of Father proceeds our relationship to authority, to institutions and laws, and even perhaps to the ultimate image of “God.” Reams have been written about the enormous power and influence that these archetypes have in our psyches.

​Lara Newton is a Jungian analyst who is deeply implicated in both the academic and administrative aspects of the Jungian world. At the time of the writing of this book, she was coordinator of admissions and training, as well as Vice-President of the C. G. Jung Institute of Colorado. Writing on the subject of sister-brother relationships, she shares with us her own personal experience as a sister as well as drawing on her experience as an analyst in private practice in Denver.

​ Newton takes issue with the notion that all male-female relationships are variations on the Mother-Father paradigm. In her new book, Brothers and Sisters: Discovering the Psychology of Companionship, she disagrees with the commonly held idea that the Brother-Sister relationship is a sort of watered down version of the Mother-Father pairing and in fact makes the radical interpretation that quite the opposite may be true. She goes so far as to suggest that the Mother-Father pairing, rather than being a symbolic ideal, is a sort of attempt to return to an original, equal brother-sister state on the part of individuals “broken out” of their own earlier brother-sister partnerships. Newton recognizes, of course, that we do not all have real sisters and brothers. However she identifies all sorts of youthful cross-gender relationships, including cousins, opposite-sex friends and even imaginary friends, which contain the potential for this kind of development.

​ Newton draws on patterns of sister-brother relationships in fairy tales and legends and interweaves them intelligently with case material to illuminate the various stages of development of the sister-brother bond, describing the somewhat different paths and developmental needs of the brother and the sister. This is not always a rosy view, and in the stories and anecdotes, she considers the ways it is experienced both fruitfully and destructively in real lives. For Newton, experiences of wounding and separation are necessary even in the best relationships because they break the participation mystique and permit the creation of individual lives. For Newton it is the loss of the original brother-sister unity which drives the requirement to develop an inner relationship to the potential of a contra-sexual part; it is this inner relationship which permits the individual to move out into life autonomously and independently of the real relationship. ​

​ Newton seems to propose that the sister or brother energy is not only allied with the positive qualities of anima or animus but necessary to prevent the individual from being too much swallowed up by their own-sex attitudes and cultural training. At its best, she suggests, brother energy provides a sister with “questing spirit” and sister energy challenges a brother to defy what our culture tells a man that he should be, and permits him to turn his gaze lovingly inward toward his own feeling and emotional life.

​ Her central thesis stands in high contrast to Aron’s description of gender identity as “splitting, with concomitant idealization and devaluation.” Instead, Newton reminds us of the image of the conjoined Masculine and Feminine — “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” — which is the centrepiece of an alchemical series Jung referred to, and notes that from that coniunctio proceed all further positive developments in the series.

In her final chapter she concludes:

In the fairy tales, sometimes the sister and brother live happily together all their lives, sometimes they separate tragically, sometimes theirs is a relationship of struggle and heartache. This is how the inner dynamic works in our lives. The brother-sister relationship provides a multifaceted image of the potential within us all. It is a potential for companionship, for breaking bread together and for going into the world with a fierce desire for truth and equality. Within this potential there endures a loyalty to the life generated by devotion to its inner source. (p. 195)

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However it is arrived at, we live, for all practical purposes, in a gendered world. We see our experience through gendered eyes. Newton’s book reminds us that, whether we arrive at it by innate genetics or by cultural conditioning, the gendered world we are born into “denies the potential complexity of both genders and we are all wounded by this denial.” Her vision of sister-brother companionship helps create a psychological space for each of us within which we can work to restore this complexity.

—Susan Meindl

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