Hard Times and Sibling Songs: Sibling Relations in Contemporary Irish Literature

Abstract

‘Siblings provide a way of learning to love and hate the same person’, so writes Juliet Mitchell in her landmark 2003 study of the role played by sibling relations in psychological development (225). Her attention to siblings displaces the emphasis on sibling rivalry, and the Oedipal emphasis, of classical psychoanalysis. Mitchell addresses the co-existence of identification and difference in sibling relationships as a vital aspect of identity formation. This rethinking potentially yields a different negotiation of prevailing models of self, entailing a shift away from the dominant independent, rationalized paradigm of selfhood stemming from the Enlightenment and significantly furthered in Freudian accounts of subjectivity. Feminist thought has for decades perceived as patriarchal in effect, while being notionally gender-neutral, this model of the self as autonomous, which still underpins popular conceptions of individuality (all the more strongly in the neo-liberal era). Mitchell’s work on siblinghood is, then, a significant advance in the explanation of relational practices and meanings developed in feminist theory from the 1980s onwards, enabling fuller acknowledgement and articulation of connectedness in concepts of the self and its social roles.¹ Her attention to intersubjective connections significantly modifies normative conceptions of the individual self as constitutively separate from others.