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Heinz Kohut's final contribution of major importance to self psychological theory was determining that the alterego or twinship transference formed from a disturbance in a third major selfobject developmental line. He no longer considered the alterego or twinship transference to be a subspecies of the mirroring transference. He also suggested that there may be an intrinsic relationship between alterego experiences and the acquisition of skills and talents.
Kohut introduced his discussion of the twinship developmental needs in How Does Analysis Cure? (1984) by describing a particular phase in the analysis of a middle-aged woman. This phase was ushered in by a disruption in the transference that resulted from the announcement of Kohut's upcoming vacation. This patient's transference disruption brought about the emergence of a highly valued fantasy that had been important to her from early in life. It was the fantasy of a genie in a bottle, and, as Kohut was eventually to discover, this genie was experienced as a twin, an essential likeness of the patient to whom she could relate whenever she felt unsupported and alone. Further association and the analysis of particular resistances motivated by shame, brought forth the memory of the normal alterego counterpart of the genie-in-the-bottle fantasy. The patient remembered a time when she was a little girl, perhaps 4 years old, and she was standing in the kitchen alongside her grandmother, kneading dough. On the basis of such observations as this, the primary experience of likeness and the learning of a particular skill, in this instance, kneading dough, Kohut came to link these two phenomena (Kohut, 1984).
In a recent essay (Detrick, 1985) on the alterego or twinship developmental line, I focused on sexualizations, addictions, borderline