Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

March 23, 1965. OPPOSITE SEX TWINS. Jules Glenn, M.D.

The author demonstrates that opposite-sex twins manifest the same characteristics noted in same-sex fraternal twins and in identical twins. These traits, typical of the 'twinning reaction', encompass difficulty in establishing a sense of identity and an adequate self-image, a tendency to polarize active and passive roles, difficulty in resolving the Oedipus complex because of the ease of substitute gratification through the twin, defectiveness of the superego, sticky transferences, and displacement as the result of a tendency to see the world as full of twins. Although opposite-sex twins are actually slightly more common than identical twins, the psychoanalytic literature contains only one article on them, by Hilda Abraham in 1953. Glenn bases his study on this article, the analysis of an opposite-sex twin, and psychotherapeutic interviews with a ten-year-old girl twin and two adult female twins, one of whom was subsequently analyzed. Mythological, anthropological, and literary references support the author's clinical findings.

Dr. Glenn's analysand entered treatment because of anxieties about dying of a heart attack, burglars, and impulses to injure his wife. These were related to his feelings of incompleteness, of having been robbed of half of his penis in the womb by his twin sister. Fantasies about circumcision determined his impulses to rob and cheat his analyst, wife, sister, and business partner. The business partner appeared to be a surrogate twin who ate the same food, drove the same car as the patient, and was in a business similar to the twin sister. Though the patient and his twin sister had slept in the same room until the age of nineteen and 'she was as beautiful as a movie-star', he was never aware of any attraction to her. However, in analysis it developed that she was the central figure in his masturbation fantasies which were precipitated by his mother's absence. The patient was primit