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Vivienne Lewin, the author of this book, is a London-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist. As a non-twin, she describes herself as an ‘outsider’, but ‘with an insider's perspective’ through her experiences as a transference twin in her psychoanalytic work. She has had a number of twins in therapy with her. She has also worked in a discussion group with mothers of twins and has clearly carried out a thorough survey of the (particularly analytic) literature on twins.
The subject of twins, as Lewin reminds us, both fascinates and disturbs us. There is the uncanniness of the double and also what the author calls our ‘universal urge towards twinning’. By ‘twinning’, it emerges that the author means two different things. One is the common childhood fantasy of having a perfectly attuned companion; in exploring the origins of this, the author refers to Klein's (1963) idea of a ubiquitous internal loneliness, and an unsatisfied longing for a perfect understanding without words, that the primary relationship can never quite provide, or provide for long enough.
The other idea subsumed in Lewin's use of the word ‘twinning’ is an early infantile process which she describes as ‘the twinning process between infant and breast’. The author refers to the work of both Bion and Meltzer as suggesting that the breast is the infant's first imaginary twin, omnipotently created. She implies that this is a universal phenomenon.
Lewin asserts that these two processes (the formation of the imaginary companion and the formation of the ‘breast twin’) are very closely linked, and she uses the word ‘phantasy’ to describe both, although she acknowledges that the infantile one is unconscious while the later childhood phenomenon is not. The author did not entirely convince me that the two were similar enough to be subsumed under this same word ‘twinning’, which emerges as so central in the book. Surely they are rather different and variable phenomena, belonging to different stages of development?
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