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THE RELATEDNESS of identical twins to each other, and the intrapsychic expectancies and patterns developed therefrom, are of vital importance to the understanding of the twins' personalities and of their psychoanalytic treatment. Indeed, one reason for the persistent appearance of twins in the evolving records of man and his thought is the unexplained mystery surrounding their special unity. They have been a focus of interest, with stress on their unity, in the rituals of certain primitive tribes, 10 the myths of the Greeks, 12, 25, 23, 26 and literary works. 31, 35, 27, 3 But how can this unity be explained? They are alike in that they have an identical genetic structure and similar physical appearances. Does it also hold true that identical twins have identical personalities? Those researchers who maintain that personality is primarily genetically determined would affirm the notion of personality identity. Seen from the point of view of psychological development, the personality of twins need not be identical. There does appear to be, however, a psychological unity, a "we-self" of two personalities to some extent functioning as one.1
The psychological unity of identical twins is the focus of this paper. The author proposes that it involves a complementarity of mutually shared aspects of personality, a we-self. The emphasis is on unfortunate or non-healthful aspects of this complementarity.
As Thompson 34 indicates, the concepts of self and self-system in interpersonal theory are not altogether clear. Sullivan 33 develops the idea of self-system as an enduring, relatively unchanging, learned group of attitudes sufficiently acceptable to significant others so as to minimize anxiety. He thus emphasizes three parameters of the self-system: the