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The author states that the purpose of this book is to offer some important truths about lone twins whose experiences she believes have not been sufficiently understood or validated. The book is the outcome of Woodward's ‘Bereaved Twin Study’ in which she interviewed 219 lone twins, documenting personal accounts of their bereavement and tapping into a rich seam of emotional experiences. The documentation was divided into three categories: 1) those who had lost a twin at birth, 2) in childhood and 3) in adulthood. The evidence, although anecdotal, is gripping and convincing.
Following her interviews, Woodward then invited twenty-five of her subjects to meet together to discuss their experiences. One lone twin said: ‘Difficulties coping with loss and separation in lone twins were too common to be coincidence. I'm sure some people who are not lone twins also have difficulties with separation and loss, perhaps deriving from other factors in their personal history, but I'm convinced that the extent of the desperation which lone twins seem to feel regarding loss and the number of people at the meeting who expressed such intense feelings cannot be coincidental’ (p. 48).
Joan Woodward is a lone twin and it was through her own soul-searching that she embarked on this project. Following the sudden death of her twin sister at 4 years of age she refused to go out of the house and her mother took her to see a child psychoanalyst. Woodward subsequently trained as a psychotherapist but felt no more satisfied that Freudian psychoanalysis understood the lone twin dimension than she had, as a child, felt understood by the child psychoanalyst. She felt she needed to find an alternative theoretical framework to comprehend her loss. She found that Bowlby's attachment theory stood up to the rigorous examination of the many twins' responses to their losses and also provided pointers to helpful therapeutic interventions missing in traditional psychoanalysis.
The study focused on how twins actu