From a Cohesive Self to a Relational Being: The Evolution of the Psychology of the Self to the Psychology of Being Human

The twinship/alter-ego experience, defined as a sense of being human among other human beings, is one of the most significant concepts of Heinz Kohut’s Psychology of the Self. Throughout his work, Kohut always referred to both the twinship and alter-ego terms interchangeably, but he never clarified his use of the two very different concepts to encompass one idea. In this article, we attempt to clarify this by exploring how the twinship experience and the alter-ego experience do, or do not, come into contact with each other. Through a reexamination of a case vignette about Anna, who we have discussed elsewhere, we illustrate that the twinship experience is an intersubjective process which involves both the significance of the way in which two people came to meet each other and how they have experienced being together, while the alter-ego experience is about a human dialogue between different facets within a person, and between different people, both of which emerge in the traumatic world that people existentially share with, and hide from themselves and each other. We conclude with an assertion that a “sense of being human” emerges in a space where these two very different, but related experiences encounter, and engage with each other in a “complex relational dance” (Suchorov, personal communication).