Introduction

Until the current decade, the most significant family relationship, both in analysis of medieval western culture and in psychoanalytic studies, was that of child and parent: between father and son in the textual productions of the medieval aristocracy, confirming class status and constituting a major component of identity in medieval literature; between mother and child in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis as it teased out the ramifications of Freud's Œdipal complex. Since the turn of the millennium, however, psychoanalytical attention has turned to sibling relationships, a field which psychologists were already investigating. With the work of Juliet Miller in the psychoanalytic field, Terri Apter (at a popular level) and Judy Dunn and Victor Cicirelli in developmental and social psychology, new insights into sibling relationships in adult life have been achieved, broadly agreeing with folk-psychological understandings of sibling behaviour, as negotiating ‘feeling[s] of envy, primitive and horrible’, as well as evidencing profound loyalty and love. In this essay I examine some sibling interactions in Malory's Morte Darthur, using a broadly psychoanalytical perspective to investigate how sibling relationships are assimilated to the other kinds of affective ties within the fifteenth-century romance world of Malory's text and the earlier versions of sibling bonds which Malory found in his sources.

Catherine La Farge has recently taken dramatic note of blood-relations between siblings in Malory: ‘Brotherly embraces hover on the brink of murder. Love between brother and sister is crucially represented by fatal incest.’