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Being a twin is in itself not a traumatic situation. In a society of twins, the single born would be the oddity. Antisocial attitudes, lack of empathy, and schizophrenic withdrawal would then be traced by the analyst (who would himself be a twin) to the trauma of being single born. In such a society, you could no more speak of the trauma of being a twin than of the trauma of being human.
The analytic approach would not be affected. Possibly, sibling rivalry would be carried back to the question: Who was the firstborn and why? Traumatization may occur at an early date if one twin has died before birth or during delivery. In an immature mind even a carelessly told story may generate fratricidal fantasies. In our society such fantasies are comparatively rare and may well be explained by retrojection to cover up a higher level and different type of guilt. The complications arising from retrojection are the subject of this paper. It tells the neurotic history of a young man whose birth followed that of a dead and decomposing twin. Such nebulous beginnings of life are eminently conducive for a vivid imagination to develop mechanisms which serve as an escape from responsibility for the present. Blinding oneself to the recognition that it is impossible to lift oneself by the bootstraps is a typical concomitant of deepseated neurosis.
George, the young man, was six-foot-two, but he weighed only 135 pounds. His thinness and his Mephistophelian looks gave him the appearance of a scarecrow. He was twenty-five years old, had had two years of out-of-state teaching experience, and was now studying at Columbia College. His father had died four years before; his mother remarried a year later. His stepfather he had never met, but his own father had caused him a tremendous amount of trouble. “He was a stupid tyrant who demanded obedience without giving