New Understandings of Twin Relationships takes an experience-based approach to exploring how twin attachment and estrangement are critical to understanding the push and pull of closely entwined personal relationships. Based on the research expertise of each of the authors (all identical twins in their own right), and vignettes from twins across the globe, this book describes the inner workings of the twin-world, showing how the twin-world creates experiences that are often more intense and intricately textured than those in the singleton-world. Chapters debunk myths surrounding twinship and analyze the developmental stages of the twin relationship as well as the effect of being a twin on one’s mental health from different perspectives. The authors articulate how attachment, separation anxiety, loneliness, estrangement, and the subjective experience of the twin and non-twin "other" impact behavior, thinking, and feeling. Through its careful study of the many psychological challenges that twins face throughout their lifetime, this text will help psychologists, scholars, clinicians, and twins themselves attain a deeper understanding of all interpersonal relationships.

The development of how twins relate to each other and their single partners is explored through life stories and clinical examples in this telling study of twin interconnections. While the quality of a nurturing family life is crucial, Dr. Klein has found there are often issues with separation anxiety, loneliness, competition with each other, and finding friendships outside of twinship. When twin lives are entwined because of inadequate parenting and estrangement, twin loss is possible and traumatic, creating a crippling fear of expansiveness—an inability to be yourself. Therapists and twins seeking an understanding of twin relationships will find this clinically compelling book a valuable resource.

Alone in the Mirror: Twins in Therapy presents psychologically-focused real life histories, which demonstrate how childhood experiences shape the twin attachment and individual development. Readers will find the practices and the insights within invaluable, whether they use them to communicate with twin patients, family members, or if they are part of a twinship themselves.

Even twins are unique. Most people idealize twins, fantasizing a close, perpetually loving relationship. Yet Klein, herself an identical twin, demonstrates that twins have complicated and intense relationships that range from over-identification or excessive closeness to profound estrangement and conflict. Most twins who are raised as individuals deal with the significant emotional pain of separation in adolescence or young adulthood, yet as mature adults can come to love and respect each other as individuals. As Klein makes clear, the parenting that twins receive as infants and young children affects the relationships that they have with one another and with the world they choose to function in. Because parenting is a critical determinant of psychological well-being, it should be treated as a serious but manageable challenge. This book is a must-read for twins, their parents, and scholars, students, and other researchers and professionals dealing with mental health and child development.

The universal phantasy of having a twin originates in our earliest relational experiences. This book is about twins and twinning processes. The existence of an actual twin, alive or dead, may be experienced as an embodiment of the phantasy of having a twin, with developmental consequences. Twinning processes in twins lead to the creation of an internal twin relationship that is enduring. The twin relationship may be at the narcissistic end of the spectrum leading to an enmeshed twinship, or it may be a more mature object relationship. All twin relationships will be manifest in the transference relationship with the analyst. The twin transference has been largely neglected in the psychoanalytic literature, to the detriment of our understanding of dynamic processes in twin patients. In this book, case material is used to explore the nature of the twin transference relationship and the necessity of analysing the twin transference, as well as maternal and paternal transference relationships.

Journalist Abigail Pogrebin is many things—wife, mother, New Yorker—but the one that has defined her most profoundly is “identical twin.” As children, she and her sister, Robin, were inseparable. But when Robin began to pull away as an adult, Abigail was left to wonder not only why, but also about the very nature of twinship. What does it mean to have a mirror image? How can you be unique when somebody shares your DNA? In One and the Same, Abigail sets off on a quest to understand how genetics shape us, crisscrossing the country to explore the varied relationships between twins, which range from passionate to bitterly resentful. She speaks to the experts and tries to answer the question parents ask most—is it better to encourage their separateness or closeness? And she paints a riveting portrait of twin life, yielding fascinating truths about how we become who we are.

The book offers a unique in-depth understanding of the twin relationship, and the way in which twin development is affected by our attitudes to twins and our enduring fascination with them. It explores our historical fascination with this subject and the origins of this excitement, how our perceptions of twins reflect our own longing for a perfect soul-mate, and the effect this personal projection has on the development in twins. It is a book written with the general reader in mind rather than "experts". Twins share a deep psychic bond that forms the core of their twinship, but they are never identical. Many factors will affect their development, including the early mutual resonances and sensate experiences between them, and parental and societal attitudes in raising them.