I have been working with a middle-aged woman whose twin brother died suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago. It has taken her a long time to find the right therapist to help her work through her loss. She tried attending various grief groups; however, her disappointment and anger about not finding anyone who could intrinsically understand the loss as it related to the twin relationship made the process all the more difficult, painful, and prolonged. She appreciated e-mail exchanges […]
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Viva la Diferencia: Not in Cuba!
I was so very fortunate to have an informal talk with Dr. Beatriz Marcheco-Teruel when I visited Havana last month. Dr. Marcheco-Teruel established and directs the Cuban Twin Registry. She described how she trained workers to do outreach in many Cuban provinces to record twin births and to determine zygosity, birthing practices, and birth order. She told me that the majority of twin births in Cuba occur naturally as opposed to by cesarean section. She also mentioned that it would […]
Can’t Live with Her; Can’t Live without Her
This is a familiar lament I hear again and again in my encounters with twins. The individuals I have worked with who confront this conundrum have not been able to separate comfortably from their twin. A tumultuous history of mutual dependence, struggle, and resentment has rendered the twins incapable of communicating authentically. Their ambivalent behaviors toward one another—a push-pull struggle—keep them connected via distrust and guilt. An adult twin in her early forties shared her experiences. She told me that […]
Limelight, Love, and Singularity
A father of twins raised a poignant dilemma during one of my recent presentations. He feels terribly uncomfortable praising one twin for his special talent and not being able to do the same for his other son. Specifically, he is uncomfortable complimenting one son’s musical skills because his brother does not demonstrate the same proficiency. He feels guilty and unclear about treating each one differently. That this dad equates praising one son as diminishing the other illustrates how much this […]
Pathological Accommodation
When I first read about a psychological process called pathological accommodation during my psychoanalytic training, I was struck by how it might also be useful in understanding some aspects of twin relationships. The concept originated out of the work of psychoanalyst Dr. Bernard Brandchaft. Dr. Shelley Doctors, another prominent psychoanalyst, describes how to understand this dynamic in terms of the mother-infant dyad: A person, likely from infancy onward, learns essentially to erase him- or herself in order to have a […]