Chapter 3 Twinship Selfobject Experience and Homosexuality

The ubiquity of themes of differentness and alienation in the life stories of our gay patients suggests a consideration of the vicissitudes of the twinship selfobject experience in the psychological development and psychoanalytic treatment of people who are homosexual. In this chapter, I attempt to begin such an exploration and, in doing so, hope to make some contribution to an understanding of normal homosexual development and experience.

Kohut did not elaborate on the twinship selfobject need as thoroughly as he did that of the mirroring and idealizing self experiences. He did, however, emphasize two aspects of the twinship selfobject experience: (1) the feeling of alikeness and (2) the role of twinship in the acquisition of talents and skills (Kohut, 1971, 1984). Alikeness, he proposed, was the foundation of a healthy sense of belonging. With regard to the latter aspect, Kohut felt that an adequate twinship selfobject experience is the basis for a full actualization of the self, in that the development of talents, skills, and efficacy occurs in the context of shared human experience. The twinship selfobject experience, like the mirroring and idealizing selfobject experiences, has its own developmental trajectory. This begins as one comes to feel oneself a member of the human species in the most basic way, proceeds through gender identification, and extends to differentiated experiences of alikeness derived from uniquely determined aspects of the mature self. Kohut (1984) regarded twinship as especially critical during the oedipal phase, when