The bond between sisters, which is fundamental to every woman, is one of the most intriguing and mysterious, yet it is also one of the least explored, a blind spot in theories about the family. Laura Pigozzi, a psychoanalyst who has always been attentive to family issues, sheds light on this topic in her essay and, through clinical and literary cases, news stories, and films, reconstructs a unique cross-section of sisterhood.

A sister accompanies us throughout our lives: we have known her forever, and our relationships with friends, with female groups, but also with our partners, inherit much from this love-hate relationship. A sister is the longest and most significant bond with the female Other and with our own otherness as women. At first, we feel her as an intruder, yet she is the one who dethrones us from our uniqueness and curbs our narcissism. We may feel boundless jealousy, but without her we cannot learn to reconcile difference and equality, the Cartesian axes of any project of humanization. Even when the relationship with a sister has been painfully severed, she remains within us, like an unconscious memory of a foundational bond. This intensity can even be found in only daughters who choose their best friend instead of their sister. The bond between sisters, structural in every woman, is one of the most intriguing and mysterious, yet it is also one of the least investigated, a blind spot in theories about the family. Laura Pigozzi, a psychoanalyst who has always been attentive to family issues, sheds light on this topic in her essay and, through clinical and literary cases, news reports, and films, reconstructs a unique cross-section of sisterhood. From the ambiguous relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, to the Marquis de Sade's sister-in-law who loved the same man as her sister, from mute twins to murderous sisters, the famous Papins, the text leads us to a new idea of feminism, based on a sisterly bond stronger than dependence, free from both the plusmaterno and the ravage, and definitively clarifying their difference. Understanding the value of this figure means knowing how to build with her—whether she is a natural, adopted, or social sister—an alliance that goes beyond dangerous symbiosis and subjugation: if we are not independent among ourselves as women, how can we be independent from men?