Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (review)

The mystery of human behavior (its origins, the shaping influences upon it) continues to challenge us, as does that of creativity—what makes for talent, for originality of thought, perception, and expression. One hundred years ago Sigmund Freud was pondering such matters, trying to understand the ways in which a particular life’s history exerts its sway on a person’s dreams, hopes, preoccupations, worries. His patients became his teachers, and eventually he gave their stories to us—and used them to construct a metapsychology: theories meant to guide us as we contemplate the twists and turns, the vicissitudes, of mental life. He was a physician, a psychiatrist, and so inevitably he paid special attention to the aberrant side of our behavior—though he was brilliantly willing to acknowledge all that we share with one another, no matter what our background: the “drives” that press upon us, the yearnings we have, and, too, the envies, rivalries, and jealousies.

Frank Sulloway is a historian who knows well the work of Freud and that of Darwin, those two giants of recent Western thought. He has also paid attention to a third influential presence, a contemporary of Darwin and an immediate predecessor of the mature Freud, Karl Marx—who saw us as primarily members of a social and economic order, rather than of this or that family. (At one point during the nineteenth century all three of these powerful theorists were alive.) Of the three, Sulloway chooses Darwin as his intellectual guide, and he sends us a signal with the first word of his book’s title that he intends to do so: biology matters much, whatever the influences of family life (Freud) and society (Marx). When we are born we already have a particular destiny: either others—our siblings—have preceded us, or we are the first to arrive. It is this experience that most significantly bears down on us throughout our lives, or so we are asked to believe on the basis of a historian’s scrutiny of many individuals who have lived at different times and in different places.

We are given factuality here, a historian’s careful work with records, biographies, newspaper stories, but we are also offered a conceptual point of view that insists upon an overall likelihood: the firstborn tend to be loyal to traditions, anxious to keep things as they are, whereas later-born boys or girls tend to be more willing to look askance at the established order, even to take issue with it—and such an inclination can, of course, nourish a writer’s, an artist’s, a political leader’s creative life. In support of this way of looking at family experience, we are offered analytic forays into history: during the Reformation, for instance, firstborns were, by far, the staunch, martyred defenders of the religious status quo of the Catholic Church, whereas later-borns were prominently and predominantly the Protestant martyrs. Even our Supreme Court’s history is grist for Sulloway’s theoretical mill: he tells us that the more conservative justices were firstborns, and the ones more willing to break with tradition were later-borns. Indeed, everyone who appears in this book has this new kind of identity—George Eliot is a later-born, and her novel Middlemarch is interpreted with that consideration in mind.

All that Frank Sulloway tells us—in a clear, accessible, even inviting prose—is of substantial and suggestive interest. With his help we can regard our children with a heightened awareness, see them as part of a struggle for survival and authority within a family’s life, with winners and losers (and sore losers), with defenders of the status quo and those determined to alter it or overthrow it (or, through the mind’s resourcefulness, transform it by indirection—the task and responsibility of the artist, the writer, and, yes, the theorist). In that regard this book offers a sweeping interpretation of...