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In 'Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun', I established that the protagonists of these plays manifested the characteristics of twins even though they were not represented as such. I attributed this phenomenon to the fact that the authors, Anthony and Peter Shaffer respectively, are fraternal twins. They projected their own characteristics and relationships on to their creations. In the present paper I confirmed these findings through an analysis of Frenzy, whose screenplay was written by Anthony Shaffer. I then extended my thesis to show that the form, style and even the titles of these plays may be influenced by twinning.
The typical characteristics of twins that are described in the analytic literature include: (1) the unconscious fantasy of being half a person and the associated belief that he was deprived of half his body in the womb or in infancy; (2) the desire for revenge toward his mother and sibling for imagined or real deprivations; (3) the wish to make things even; (4) intense rivalry intertwined with intense libidinal attachment; (5) lifelong identification with the other twin and the prominent use of identification as a defence; (6) uncertainty about separation of self-representation and object-representation; (7) through displacement and projection the world will appear to be populated by people who have these characteristics and who are pictured as twins; (8) the twins may complement each other, each one taking on traits opposite to his sibling.