AS one of four brothers, I grew up in a veritable petri dish for sibling rivalry. Harry, Ned, Mark and I rarely fought physically, but there was little we didn't contest: baseball, checkers and Candy Land, definitely, but more sophisticated sports as well — the battle over the Sunday funnies, the race to take the first bath, the jousting for position on the sofa as our mother read to us before bed.
Our rivalry played out most nakedly at the dinner table. Who got the largest hamburger? Who finished eating fast enough to get seconds before the food ran out? Who got the biggest slice of pie? Attempting to forestall quarrels, our mother cut portions so nearly identical it would have taken a micrometer to tell them apart. But in vain. Whether lunging for the last hot dog, filching an extra piece of crispy skin from the roast chicken or merely noting who had gotten the most cherries in his fruit cocktail, each of us struggled, constantly, to get our fair share — or, preferably, a lot more.
Our fraternal feeding frenzy wasn't unusual, as I learned while writing a book about brothers. On one "pancake night" in the down-at-heels Joyce household, all four brothers simultaneously dove for the last pancake on the platter. The future author of "Ulysses" got there first. "James made off with the prize and ran up and down stairs, protesting to his pursuers that he had already eaten it," wrote the biographer Richard Ellmann. "At last they were convinced, and he then imperturbably removed the pancake from the pocket where it lay hidden, and ate it up with the air of little Jack Horner."
Growing up in a crowded apartment on East 93rd Street, Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo Marx shared a bed relatively peaceably, but not a meal. "There was generally some kind of a brawl at the dinner table over who would get what," said Groucho, who recalled reaching for the last roll on the plate only to see a cleaver, wielded by the normally equable Harpo, slam down within an inch of his hand.
Of the countless fistfights between Joe Kennedy Jr. and his younger brother Jack, one of the most memorable was triggered when Jack snatched Joe's slice of chocolate pie — his brother's favorite dessert — from under Joe's nose at the dinner table. Gobbling it up, Jack ran outside and down the beach, his apoplectic brother giving chase. Cornered on the jetty, Jack leapt into the bay. Joe stood above him, watching him tread water, until Jack was forced to emerge, cold and dripping. The two Kennedys then duked it out on shore.
That sibling rivalry frequently plays out over dinner — or breakfast or lunch — shouldn't be surprising. Although sometimes a chicken breast really is just a chicken breast, it doesn't take Freud to see that food is a relatively literal stand-in for parental nourishment. (When I was a child, of course, if someone had suggested to me that wrestling my brothers for the marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms might have been a way of vying for the attention of our parents, I would have snorted incredulously.) The word "rival" is derived from the Latin "rivalis," meaning "using the same stream as another." In pre-Christian times, rivals were people or tribes who fought over water from the same river. "In our terms," the psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer once observed, "the river is the mother who supplies our basic needs, and the children compete for access to her."
The term sibling rivalry was coined in 1930 and popularized by the child psychiatrist David Levy, who gave his patients celluloid dolls that represented their parents and younger siblings and asked them what they felt when they saw the baby brother or sister doll nursing at its mother's breast. There ensued scenes of sibling carnage to rival anything in the Old Testament. Among the responses recorded by Levy: "dropping," "shooting," "throwing," "slapping," "hitting with stick," "hammering," "tearing apart," "scattering parts," "biting," "crushing with fingers," "crushing with feet," "crushing with truck" and "piercing (with screw driver)." Levy (who repeated his experiments among the Kekchi Indians of Guatemala with similarly gruesome results) concluded that regardless of age, gender, birth order or cultural background, sibling rivalry is a fact of family life.
George Howe Colt is the author of "The Big House" and the forthcoming book "Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History."
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Opinion: Sibling Rivalry: One Long Food Fight
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2012/11/opinion-sibling-rivalry-one-long-food.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Opinion: Sibling Rivalry: One Long Food Fight
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Opinion: Sibling Rivalry: One Long Food Fight
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar