Twins have been considered a source of fascination and wonder / repulsion and fear since the beginning of recorded history. Mythology, religion, literature, film, and art use twins to represent magical powers of closeness and the opposite—discord and rage. It was not until Darwin postulated his theory of evolution that twin studies were used to consider the relative importance of genetic endowment and environmental influences. Besides their cultural notoriety as ideal images of good and bad, twins have been used by psychologists as “laboratory rats” to understand how much of personality and intelligence is inherited and how much can be nurtured by the environment. Recently, with the higher incidence of twin births, the parenting of multiples has become a focus of child development research.
The spectacle of twinship and the scientific advantage that identical twins have in predicting the strength of all kinds of biological inheritance has provided fodder for prediction, thought, and fantasy. As interpersonal and transpersonal issues have come into the mind’s eye of social and clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts, twin attachment has become a way of understanding balanced and unbalanced / harmony and disharmony in day to day relationships between twins, siblings and other intimate persons.
What twinships can tell us about close relationships is in my opinion the most important aspect of the attachment that twins share. Scientists do not want to give up studying twins, even with the widespread overwhelming critical analysis of why twin studies are inaccurate. The similarities of twins can blindside both casual onlookers and objectively focused researchers. Estrangement between twins is seen as highly unusual, but in my experience fighting and deep resentment is very common and treacherous for twins who cannot really get along.
Twin attachment and estrangement is, relatively speaking, unexplored, but so critical to understanding the push and pull of close and naturally entwined personal relationships. Twins are born married. They share a primary attachment that is irreplaceable and forms a lifelong attachment/bond and an indelible identity. Sharing their in utero life is the beginning of twins’ nonverbal communication, need for closeness, and frustration and anger with their twin. Comfort is found in physical proximity, where a sense of oneness is maintained and often endures throughout twins’ lifespans. Competition and confusion about which child needs to be feed or held is a normal and ongoing experience that evolves into other aspects of life as twins grow. Parents can and do feel left out of the closeness that twins share. The power of two can be daunting, overwhelming, and even destructive. In other words, twins are not clones of one another or ideal mirrors of affirmation for one another. In general, adult twins complete one another in an overly enmeshed way—or compete with each other mercilessly.
Parents that find and affirm genuine differences between their twin children help them to develop a healthy sense of self. No matter how attentive parents are to their children’s needs, intense sharing and caring and fighting are highly developed. Some competition and fighting is over the top. The general conflict often is, “Who is at fault?” Closeness is both extremely nurturing or extremely disruptive because of the interdependence in identities. Eventually twins must learn to create healthy relationships with people outside of the twinship. In a sense, twins have to become relationship experts because of their need for other people to easily connect with their thoughts and feelings. Twins take a long difficult journey as they try to find non-twin relationships that are meaningful.
Just like twins, non-twins have expectations for one another and project on to one another in ways that can create disharmony and estrangement. But twins have exaggerated problems with expectation and disappointment. For example, twin A thinks that twin B is not attentive enough. Twin A continually complains that her twin sister B needs to spend more careful and special time with her. Twin B is angry and resentful and starts to stay away from her sister. And so it goes until fighting cannot be resolved. Twin-like problems of oversharing, expectations that are unreasonable, fighting, and projective identification are found in most close interpersonal relationships. Exploring the lived experiences of twins’ patterns of coping, structure that provides containment to chaos, and fighting and anger will illuminate twin and non-twin relationships.