You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To the Editors:
I was tremendously interested in Dr. Dale Ortmeyer's recent article on twinship [ This Journal, volume 6, No. 2]. His emphasis on complementarity is very stimulating and certainly corresponds to our clinical observations. We have been observing twins for quite a number of years as part of a psychophysiological study.
Our clinical material includes about twenty pairs of monozygotic and ten pairs of dizygotic male twins of college age (many of them undergraduates at Harvard). They were, of course, going throught the phase of post-adolescence. Our observations have included about nine recorded interviews (about an hour each) on each of the subjects which were subsequently typed. We have also carried out studies of the metabolic end-products of steroid metabolism in the form of 17-ketosteroids and 17-hydroxycorticosteroids in urine samples (about thirty-five 24-hour urine samples for each subject).
I must admit I had not realized how difficult it would be to apply any existing concepts concerning linguistics to our material. We have, however, felt sure that we can only get an answer by making full use of the implications of post-adolescence. The fact that these are college boys (often at the same college) would seem to make the shift from emphasis on motor activity to articulate intellectual communication of particular importance. But here again we are in an area where the complexities of twinship have to be considered in every possible way, including the urge for polarization as part of the process of establishing individuality and the way in which the pattern of complementarity, as Dr. Ortmeyer has so well described it, becomes revised.