Summer is traditionally a time for lucky families to recover from the strains of the work and school treadmill and take time together on holiday – but this added space and time also allows the tensions that trammel and contain us in the web of family life to spring to life like waiting demons.
Here is some reading that reflects on family relations and the deep fissures of ambivalence we feel towards those to whom we are related. Terri Apter is a shrewd psychologist and her book The Sister Knot covers the subject of sibling rivalry: “She’s got the red spade and you said I could have that!”
As well as being a highly original thinker, Adam Phillips writes in Winnicottwith elegance and a keen sympathy about one of the great analysts of children, Donald Winnicott, who brought his powerful intuition and understanding to the subject of mother and child, as “the nursing couple”. Phillips also shares Winnicott’s rare feeling (among psychoanalysts) for poetry.
Mansfield Park is perhaps Jane Austen’s least loved novel, but in my view it is possibly her best for its depiction of the upper-middle-class neglect suffered by Maria and Julia, the spoilt Bertram girls; this in turn leads to their failure to make happy marriages. The novel also adumbrates something that is often overlooked but reads to me like a pre-Freudian grasp of the allure of incest: Fanny, the book’s principal, falls in love with Edmund, the cousin she grows up with, and ultimately he with her (an idea I borrowed for my own novel, Cousins).
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
