Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Jay Shorr cautioned against attributing pathological factors specifically to twinship. The important factor determining the traits described by Dr. Glenn might be the degree of narcissistic conflict. Dr. Shorr believed that the twin in Dr. Abraham's case suffered from a symbiotic psychosis in which she never left the anal womb of her mother, while her twin brother seemed to represent primarily a part object. He stressed the role of parents in encouraging or discouraging individual and separate identity formations in their twin children and their role in the superego development of their twins, noting that the parents of Dr. Glenn's patient had allowed the patient and his twin sister to share a room through their adolescence. Dr. Shorr thought that in identical and samesex fraternal twins the factors of narcissistic injury or narcissistic enhancement may be crucial in precipitating pathological parental attitudes or in accentuating pathological attitudes in the twins. However, in opposite-sex twins there is the additional element of the heterosexual nature of the twinship.

Dr. Edith Jacobson felt that the paper was an excellent contribution to the psychology of opposite-sex twins and to the problems of twinship in general. She commented about the important differences between opposite-sex twins and same-sex twins. Central in importance is the temptation to have incestuous relations. For example, in Dr. Glenn's patient incestuous fantasies are interwoven with twin fantasies involving wishes to merge with the twin. The fantasy of the twin sister having a penis enables the patient to transform her into a homosexual object, which helps to ward off the heterosexual incest fantasy; it also serves to ward off guilt feelings based on his having gotten more than she. Dr. Jacobson pointed out that in the girl twin described by Dr. Glenn, the wish to have a twin sister is a way of seeking to escape the heterosexual incest temptation. She also mentione