Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. George Wiedeman discussed first that aspect of the twinning reaction in which the self and object representation between the twins tends to be blurred. From his own clinical experience he illustrated this reaction by the twins' reactions to mirrors. The affect associated with this uncertainty of self and object was a feeling of being empty, phony, or incomplete. The influence of the environment toward nondifferentiation was strong, partly because of the mother's gratification in having attractive twins. The second aspect of the twinning reaction, the mutual interidentification, seemed less clearly demonstrated in the clinical material. Dr. Wiedeman recalled Marjorie Leonard's recent work where a similar concept is described. He felt the data might be viewed as illustrating primitive narcissistic object ties. Following some recent unpublished comments by Anna Freud, Dr. Wiedeman felt that the wish for a constant companion is so nearly fulfilled in twins that energy is withheld from full personality development. This can result in a sensitization to trauma and may place a limit on the analyzability of some twins.

Dr. Phyllis Greenacre felt that the 'twinning reaction' when applied to marriages of long standing was an enticing one, but she was hesitant to place it in the same category as the twinning reactions in childhood. She felt further study of specific cases was required. She recalled two cases of twinning reaction between an older and a younger sibling of the opposite sex. In both cases, the older member of the pair showed an intense oral jealousy. The fact that these pseudo twins were of different sex complicated the problem of mutual interidentification, making it more specific and less total than with true identical twins. In the latter, because of more confusion involving the self in space, one would expect major problems in body image development. It would be interesting to observe the effect