My move to the United States from Japan for my training at the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry as an International Fellow necessitated an accommodation to a vastly different language, as well as the adoption of different manners and customs. I lived in a continuous state of pretense, always trying to adjust to what was expected of me, until I lost all sense of what was normal. This intense culture shock plunged me into an acute regression. I subsequently came to experience my internal world at a level often considered psychotic. In this chapter, I describe the restoration of my sense of self through psychoanalysis from my view as the analysand, underscoring the significance of the twinship selfobject function, which contributed centrally to my restoration.

In recent years, there has been a shift within psychoanalysis from theories that focus on the patient's mind as an isolated entity to theories that view the analyst and analysand as a dyad in the context of larger