Our fascination with twinning, with ‘the double’ (Freud 1919) is deeply rooted in our unconscious psychic experience of reflection, starting with the gaze between mother and infant. If you have no experience of twinship, a good place to start is with your own reflection, something we take for granted, unknowingly notice dozens of times each day; now imagine looking in the mirror and no image is returned, no familiar face, no one, in fact. The Other looms large in our psychic experience - the ‘it’, the hidden self, the shadow, the m(O)ther that each of us carries within. To be deprived of this ‘twin’ is to be deprived of our very Self.

Do not therefore dismiss this book as only about twins: while this reader had no particular personal or professional interest in twins or twinning per