The Twin Enigma

An Exploration of Our Enduring Fascination with Twins

Vivienne Lewin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429922558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

The book offers a unique in-depth understanding of the twin relationship, and the way in which twin development is affected by our attitudes to twins and our enduring fascination with them. It explores our historical fascination with this subject and the origins of this excitement, how our perceptions of twins reflect our own longing for a perfect soul-mate, and the effect this personal projection has on the development in twins. It is a book written with the general reader in mind rather than "experts". Twins share a deep psychic bond that forms the core of their twinship, but they are never identical. Many factors will affect their development, including the early mutual resonances and sensate experiences between them, and parental and societal attitudes in raising them.

Chapter One
The twin in ourselves: intra-twin dynamics

The main focus of this book is on twins and twinning processes—our perception of twins, their development, both psychically and developmentally, and as a twin pair—and the internal dynamics that play an active part in the binding qualities of the twin relationship. Twins have to negotiate the same processes of emotional development as do singletons, but they have also to deal with the fact of being a twin, and all the factors that will affect their individual development and their twinship.

The heart of the matter

There are deep unconscious issues that affect both the twin relationship and our perception of it. Twins both fascinate and disturb us, and we tend to attribute special qualities to their relationship. In this chapter I want to look at how we idealise the twin relationship, how we project properties onto them that are our own, and are based on our own early experiences in life, and how this affects development in twins.

All multiples are felt to be odd and exciting in some way, but twins seem to generate a specific kind of interest. There are annual twin events both large and small where what seems to excite attention about the twins attending is not their individuality, differences, or the duality within a pair of twins, but their unity as a pair. They dress alike, stick together, and are interviewed together by researchers and the press. The frisson as they talk for each other, or finish each other’s sentences, is nothing compared with the excitement about the so-called secret languages of twins, or the silent unconscious communication between them that is so highly attuned and is frequently likened to telepathy.

Twins are viewed with awe in many societies, where they may be treated as gifts from the gods, or alternatively as evil omens to be banished or killed, often along with the mother who bore them (see Chapter Five). There is no doubt that twins arouse very primitive feelings in us and we tend to see them in the light of these feelings.

This fascination with twins and the raw excited feelings they arouse, lies in our own earliest experiences. Melanie Klein suggested in 1963 that there is a universal longing to be a twin, which originates in our first experience with our mothers. It is based on the deep unconscious understanding between a mother and her newborn child. Even when circumstances are not optimal, the mother is usually attuned to her baby in a way that enables her to understand the baby’s needs and wants without words. She is able to take in from the baby the raw experiences that upset or even terrify the baby, and process them in a way that makes it possible for the baby to re-absorb the altered experience in a way with which it can more easily deal, helping the baby feel understood and contained. This helps the baby begin to develop its own capacities for dealing with life, and so makes the ordinary exigencies of life more manageable to the infant.

The basics of early infant development

I will spend a little time describing the ordinary processes of mental and emotional development that we all go through, to lay the groundwork for a greater understanding of what happens to twins in their development.

In 1956, Donald Winnicott referred to the mother’s involvement with her baby as a “primary maternal preoccupation”. Whether mother is conscious of it or not, the baby is ever-present in her mind and this enables her to be responsive to her baby in a way that no one else can. It is the mother who is able to bear the terrifying anxieties her infant experiences and who is able to make the world a safer place for the baby. She is able to enjoy the baby’s intense love as well as tolerate the hate that is generated when life does not run as smoothly as the baby would like.

The baby finds interruptions, gaps, and absences difficult to tolerate with the result that he experiences frustration. If the baby finds this too much to manage, he then directs his rage at his closest objects (usually mother) in a ruthless way. Winnicott suggests that it is only the mother who can tolerate the baby’s ruthlessness, responding with love and understanding, and without feeling the need to retaliate. Of course she may be upset or hurt by it, but because of her primal bond with her infant, she can bear it. Where the mother is unable to bear the baby’s anxieties and ruthlessness, this may lead to a split in the baby’s personality. Then the vengeful ruthless self remains undiluted and un-neutralised, and may give rise to sudden eruptions of violent rage or behaviour. We see this darker side of the personality in some people, and exemplified in stories like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

If the baby has had sufficient “good enough mothering”, he will gradually develop a capacity to be alone—he will be able to tolerate gaps in provision without being overwhelmed by frustration or sometimes panic, knowing that mother will be back. The baby develops a sense of being alone but most importantly, alone in relation to another person. This depends on the development of the baby’s ability to tolerate both a sense of otherness or separateness from mother, and the ability to be separate from her without feeling overwhelmed by feelings of loss. So the non-perfect, good-enough mother is essential to the baby’s development. However, embedded in this welcome development towards individuality there is also a sense of essential loneliness, a sense of loss of a closeness that was there and that can never be replaced.

Neurological studies of the development of the brain in infants (Schore, 1994) have indicated the importance of the early relationship between the baby and the mother. The “gaze” between mother and infant is so familiar to us from seeing mothers with new babies looking into each other’s eyes, and can be seen in many artistic portrayals of mother and babies. The “gaze” between infant and mother is an essential means of communication between them. In this shared experience the baby finds a kind of mirroring of himself in mother’s eyes that enables him to develop a sense of self. The mutual relationship between this nursing pair is reflected in the way different areas of the brain of the infant develop. Those areas that have been observed to house the emotions and experiences of relatedness to another person, and the memories of those experiences, will develop in response to the actual experience of the infant with its mother. During this time, neuronal networks develop within the brain that lay down the templates for the later development of relationships throughout life. These templates are dynamic, not static, and they do retain a degree of plasticity throughout life, though they are never again quite as open to developmental influences as in the early days of the infant.

Thus we see that the intense visual connectedness between mother and baby is a vital developmental factor, but it is not the only one, as touch, smell, and hearing (the more primitive senses) also play a vital part in the creating of the bond between mother and baby. The closeness of the mother–infant relationship will depend on all these factors for development, and it is within this relationship that healthy development takes place.

Observations of infants with their mothers show that the searching for each other starts very soon after birth. There is a synchronised, very early engagement between the mother–infant couple. Karen Proner wrote in 2000 about a 7-hour-old infant searching for his mother’s face and he was able to distinguish her from an observer. The mother’s response and her receptivity to her infant will shape the infant’s next move—towards or away from her. And this process is not one-way. The mother also seeks out her infant, wanting to find out who he is, thus creating a synchronised “dance” between mother and infant.

The importance of making eye contact has been noted by Farroni, Csibra, Simion, and Johnson in 2002 and by Farroni, Johnson, and Csibra in 2004, among many others. Looking is the most powerful way of establishing a link for communicating between people. From early on, infants learn that the way other people behave has significance for them. Babies from birth onwards are able to distinguish between someone looking either directly at them and looking elsewhere and they prefer a direct gaze. With a mutual direct gaze, the neural activity in the brains of babies is enhanced. This is later reflected in social skills.

This primitive mutual, attuned response between mother and infant is the first form of postnatal communication between them. It is this early contact that creates the sense of oneness so that the mother and baby become attuned to each other. The instinctual interplay between mother and baby stimulates mother’s “reverie”, the emotional space she creates for the baby, and is a preface to mother’s “falling in love” with her infant, and for the infant to feel it belongs.

Alan Schore’s (1994) research on brain activity in these early days of the infant–mother relationship indicates that the mother regulates her infant’s state of arousal through the bond of unconscious communication between them that leads to rapid matching responses in the mother–infant pair. This interactive matrix facilitates the developing understanding between the mother and infant, and the expression of feelings between them. In this way mother modulates the level of feelings and arousal experienced by the infant. Insufficient modulation of the infant’s state of arousal will interfere with its capacity to process information. The infant will seek an optimal level of arousal where it is neither over-excited nor under-stimulated, but can attend to what is going on.

The key to mother’s capacity to repair the infant’s overly aroused state is her ability to monitor and regulate her own emotional state, particularly her negative feelings, and this leads to “good enough” mothering. Negative emotions in the infant will be minimised and the opportunities for the development of positive feelings will be maximised, as is found in states of play. This would lead the infant to a sense of safety and a positively charged curiosity about life.

The infant’s sense of self and its relationship with others build on the base of the patterns that form as a result of inter-relatedness between mother and baby. In this dynamic interactive process, mother and baby influence each other from moment to moment. The structure of these experiences arising from these interactions will help the infant organise its experiences. This is a dynamic framework in which continuous transformations and restructurings take place. The infant’s psychic development is in a constant state of active reorganisation as the baby gathers a sense of himself internally.

The patterns of mutual influence between mother and baby will include both the baby’s own regulation of its states of arousal (self-regulation), and the interactive regulation provided within the mother–baby dynamic. It will encompass the dimensions of time, space, emotional state and state of arousal. Within the first two months of life, the baby will build primitive internal images of himself based on these interactive patterns that will later form the basis of symbolic representations. Melanie Klein proposed that the infant has an innate curiosity about the world he is in, and it is clear that the baby builds his internal world based not only on his experiences of hunger, pain, and fatigue, but also on his curiosity and wish to explore through play.

Infants are also very attuned to sounds, particularly human voices. They recognise patterns of speech that indicate that they are being addressed specifically. Babies are primed to respond to people. In the first 15 hours after birth they are able to distinguish their mother’s voice from others, and they prefer it to a stranger’s voice. They also prefer their mother’s smell to a stranger’s smell and will select their mother’s face rather than a stranger’s. (Beebe, Lachmann, & Jaffe, 1997) But babies have also learned from their experiences before birth, in utero, as they can recognise repeated and familiar patterns of sounds, smells and taste from that time.

Within the first year of its life, the baby has already developed the capacity to recognise and remember faces, sounds, smells, movements, appropriate behaviour patterns, and what they mean.

It takes some time for the infant to develop his own capacities for putting together the information he receives in a way that has coherence and personal meaning, a narrative informed by current and past events and memories and experiences, i.e. for thinking. The capacity for thinking helps us deal with the world, both inner and outer, assessing the inflow of information, placing it in context, making sense of it, without feeling overwhelmed or experiencing a massive disruption to our sense of self.

Initially the baby is highly dependent on the mother, and father and wider family group, to support him in all his development, including this mental processing about the world. In the very early days, with mother attending to her baby so closely, the baby has yet to develop an understanding of what belongs to himself and what belongs outside—mother, breast, bottle, and so on. It is like developing what Esther Bick, in 1968, called an “emotional skin”, an imaginary membrane inside which the infant feels himself to exist, and recognises himself, as separate from elements in the outside world. This emotional skin is permeable, with the result that stimuli from both inside and outside can be communicated. When the infant has had a sufficiently good experience, he will have a clearer sense of what is inside and what is outside, though there are times, especially times of great stress, when there may be something of a mix-up. When this happens, this can lead to a sense of confusion of identity and consequent distress.

The internal twin

The developmental factors described above apply to all infants, whether singletons, twins or other multiples, and they have particular relevance for the development of identity in every baby. For twins the developmental issues are additionally complicated by the actual fact of the presence of another baby of the same age, ever-present in the life and mind of each baby, of mother, father, and other siblings. The presence of another baby will invariably affect the relationships between each infant and mother in the fundamental early stages of development, and later with father and other family members. I will explore this aspect of twin development more fully in the next chapter.

In the early days of an infant’s life when he has not yet developed a clear sense of his own identity, there will be a blurring of what the baby imagines is himself and what is mother. As the baby experiences mother’s care he creates mental images representing that experience, images that are dynamic and interchangeable according to the variability of the care it receives. These images or unconscious phantasies develop within the interactions between baby and mother, and it is only much later in the infant’s development that he can begin to distinguish what is his own. He will learn to recognise his own bodily and mental stimuli, what comes from outside himself, and what that outside source might be. So there is a confusion, not so much of identities but of the source of the satisfaction, frustration, pain, or pleasure that the infant experiences.

So the mother who feeds, cleans, and loves her baby, will initially be felt by the baby, in his imagination, to be part of himself, in a way a twin of himself. I say “twin”, because before the infant develops a capacity to distinguish clearly between himself and others, he will see others in his own image, as a twin. As Winnicott wrote in 1971, the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face. What does the infant see when he looks at his mother? He sees himself. The baby creates a “phantasy twin” of himself in an unconscious process.

The experience of so profound an unconscious understanding between mother and baby, the apparently perfect unconscious understanding that is provided by the attuned mother, creates a bond of togetherness between her and baby. It not only lays down the blueprint for all future communications and relationships in the infant’s life, it also leaves the each individual baby with a longing to regain this perfect understanding—a longing for the twin that so perfectly understood at a time of his greatest vulnerability and dependency.

The bible story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden represents this universal longing for a perfect untroubled state of at-oneness. The feeling of an initial innocence and at-oneness with mother/the world is lost at each interruption or break, or in terms of the Garden of Eden, at our awakening knowledge that the state of bliss is temporary, and bound to be curtailed at some point by all sorts of factors like time, tiredness, pain, and so on. We expect to encounter this secure love again, but know it will never again be untainted because we know it is fleeting, it will again end.

It is this longing that forms a deep inner core and pervades our lives, leaving us either seeking the kind of relationship that we hope will again provide this perfect understanding, or alternatively, cutting off in frustration as we lose hope of ever finding it (as may happen in autism).

It is this longing that echoes in our fascination with twins. The ubiquitous longing for a twin is, I believe, at the heart of our fascination with twins. When we encounter twins, we resurrect our own early experiences of at-oneness and project this onto the twin pair. The twins seem to have achieved what we long for, and the sight of them stimulates our excitement and perhaps our envy. We attribute to them as a couple our experiences and longings emanating from our infantile years, as we spontaneously identify with them. As a result of these projections the twins seem to acquire a rather magical quality. The phantasy of having a twin forms the core of the idealisation of the twin relationship and in this ideal phantasy the twinship is perfect, devoid of feelings of rivalry and jealousy. We believe that twinship provides a relationship of continued deep understanding and sympathy. In reality we know how very far this is from the truth—the twinship creates not only unparalleled companionship, but also vehement rivalry between the twin pair.

Phantasy twins

It is quite common to hear someone wondering if they have lost a twin before birth, convinced that this would explain a persistent feeling of sadness, an unsatisfied longing, a sense of incompleteness that they experience. This may have been true for some, but for many it is more likely to be based on a longing for a phantasy twin as a representative of the early experience of understanding with mother.

I use the word “phantasy”, rather than “fantasy”, to distinguish between this very primitive unconscious creation by the baby, and a knowing conscious “fantasy” of the more developed mind like the imaginary twins or friends of childhood. A phantasy twin provides the illusion of regaining the perfect untroubled internal state, filling in the gaps, or providing comfort while waiting. The phantasy twin is created by the infant in its own image and is therefore a narcissistic structure.

Twin infants relate not only to mother, but also to each other in a primary relationship. In mother’s absence, the sense of loneliness in each twin may be lessened by the presence of the other twin. It is as if the phantasy twin offering perfect understanding and obliterating loneliness, created on the base of the early experience with mother, becomes a reality embodied by the other twin. The other twin comes to represent the phantasy twin. When this happens, the waiting for and antic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE The twin in ourselves: intra-twin dynamics
• CHAPTER TWO Twins together: inter-twin dynamics
• CHAPTER THREE Twins apart
• CHAPTER FOUR Twins in society
• CHAPTER FIVE Twins around the world: mythology, beliefs, and cultural practices
• CHAPTER SIX Twins and doubles in literature
• CONCLUDING COMMENTS
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX