PSYCHOLOGY PAYS intense attention to the nuclear family. It is aware of the importance of parent child relationships, writes Marie Murray
Sibling relationships have traditionally been regarded as significant in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. How brothers and sisters relate to one another and to their parents has generated much research on sibling rivalry, cooperation and competition.
Literature on family relationships considers the power of one's position or birth order in the family and the various advantages and disadvantages of being eldest, youngest, middle child or only child. Yet with all that is written in the area of family therapy, insufficient attention has been paid to one important family connection: that is the relationships between cousins.
Cousins may not dominate the family therapy literature, yet they play important psychological roles in family life. Conspicuous by their absence in formal interviews with children about family, cousins often emerge as relevant when children begin to discuss extended family interactions.
For it is then that the role cousins play in a child's life emerges and what is most interesting is how that relationship between first cousins is shaped, primarily, by how well their respective parents related to each other as siblings when they were children growing up.
Of course there are degrees of consanguinity between cousins, which can both connect and confuse children as they try to understand the ties they have to the people around them and the connections between people across the generations.
First cousins, they quickly divine, are the people in your family who have two of the same grandparents as you and therefore one of whose parents was sibling to one of your parents. This is particularly easy if your father and your cousin's father were brothers, or your mother and your cousin's mother were sisters. The closeness of this tie, which seems to be particularly comprehensible to children who are cousins, confirms that there is a special bond between their parents and in turn between themselves as cousins.
As the relationship with aunts and uncles is important to children, the relationship they have with their cousins is also significant emotionally.
Cousins are more than playmates. They are family members who are automatically provided as playmates.
In a family of girls, male cousins may provide an opportunity to play with and understand boys in the same way as female cousins may gift their male cousins with their natural friendship. Cousins provide each other with important social interactions.
If they live in close proximity they are a source of reliable friendship when other creche, playschool or school friendships may change. If they live in other parts of the country or in other countries, then they represent safe ways of visiting these places.
Cousins may be older and therefore objects of awe and admiration to the younger child. Cousins may be younger, providing the opportunity to show off, to nurture and guide and be role models for them.
Cousins have a special relationship with one another's parents, as nieces and nephews, which bonds them together in a unique way. Cousins are usually sufficiently emotionally close to understand each other's emotions and sufficiently detached to provide a perspective that has distance without disconnection.
For the only child, cousins are surrogate siblings. They provide a sense of security. They are the relations of one's own generation. Cousins share knowledge of each other as children growing up.
They are co-hosts of family myth and imagination and the next generation who will hold the details of family history. They stand beside each other at family funerals and grieve together when each other's parents die.
In the kinship network cousins get very little attention and warrant much more than they receive. For what makes the relationship between cousins significant in family therapy terms is that it depends upon the relationship that their parents have with their own brothers and sisters in their own families of origin.
If cousins are held up to each other as impossible goal setters, as academic achievers or paragons of virtue and success then the relationship is denied its true supportive expression and can become one of rivalry and resentment.
But if cousins are encouraged in their inter- actions with each other as united family members and friends, psychological protectors, supporters and special to each other, then they are provided with friendships that will last forever and continue to be nurturing into adulthood and older age.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murrayis director of Student Counselling Services at UCD.