Christine Downing

This is a pretty thorough survey of the information on female sibling relationships to be found in fairy tales, Greek myth, Sumerian and Egyptian myth, depth psychology, and contemporary and historical feminist psychology. It is liberating to read someone else's unabashedly personal search for the meaning of her relationship with her sister, not hesitating to criticize existing material based on her need to see it from the perspective of a late-life lesbian with five children and a younger sister with whom she has never had a satisfactory relationship. I, in turn, am critical of her narrow viewpoint, but applaud the prodigious effort in bringing together everything that could be found on sisterhood from sources that would yield archetypal images. It was illuminating to know that Freud was a firstborn and derived his theories from his personal process and that Adler was a secondborn and, likewise, developed his birth-order theories based on his personal experiences. I was bored throughout much of the Greek myth storytelling because it was more about talking about the stories than telling them—rather like someone telling about a movie. I never grasped the connection between sisterhood and death that Downing subscribes to and said that Freud subscribed to. The chapters on depth psychology and feminist psychology I found good reading, relying as they did on the experiences of real people, rather than archetypes. Being frozen in a very painful symbiosis with my own sister, I practiced transference during the first half of the book, knowing full well that I was reading the excuses of an elder sister. As I progressed through the pages and forgave Downing for her birth order, the information became more interesting. Downing proposed that she would show how her survey of sisterhood thought applied to the larger sisterhood of all women. She never quite succeeded in that effort, as her own very personal struggle permeated every page through the final entry.… (meer)