Abstract
Whilst this book is essentially written for those concerned and interested in psychoanalytical self-psychology, psychotherapy, social work and psychiatry, it is in the area of gifted education that the perspective and content have a very special contribution to offer.
Often being identified as ‘gifted’ can be problematic for the labelled individual and create psychological problems concerned with trauma vulnerability and the difficulties associated with the construction of a positive identity. In this context, it is worthwhile and interesting to consider the concept of ‘twinship’. It is our belief that the twinship concept has to do with an essential element of all human emotional connection between people. We believe that without a twinship experience there is a deep sense of alienation, emptiness, and worthlessness, or a profound feeling of being ‘non-human’. This creates the fundamental anguish about being in the human world. (Togashi and Kottler, p. xviii)
Whilst the immediate understanding of twinship is concerned with actual ideas about twins or siblings, the work of Heinz Kohut moves our understanding of the ‘second or other self’ to: recognize twinship as an independent selfobject transference, with an elevated status sharing equal standing with idealized and mirroring selfobject experience. (Togashi and Kottler, p. 1) Mutual findings always runs as an ongoing process of human interaction when people experience a twinship selfobject tie to each other. A sense of being human among other human beings, based on the dialectic between a sense of sameness and difference at the experiential level, can be organized as a delicate balance between mutual findings of oneself and not-oneself. (Togashi, p. 69)
The text is complex and novel to a reader new to the language of twinship and therapy, however, if the reader relates the outlined therapist–client discourse and experience to an education context in which the gifted student can find causes to be lost, disorientated and isolated the benefit of learning from this book as to how to assist gifted children struggling to find an identity in a society they find challenging then the procedures and transferable elements of Kohutian thinking will be clear. A fantasy selfobject, which many post-Kohutian self-psychologists have referred to as a clinically useful concept (Bacal, 1981, 1985, 1990, 2007; Hagaman, 1966; Lachmann, 1993; Lachmann and Beebe, 1995; Coburn 207c; Shane, 1992; Shane and Shane, 1993) is ‘created by the patient when the environment provides almost nothing around which he can elaborate a need for the responsiveness he requires’ (Bacal, 1985, pp. 221–222). They evolve ‘out of an internally generated and organized selfobject that apparently has little to no referentials in the environment’ (Coburn, 2007). The creation, out of imagination, represents a striving for health and psychological stability in the face of the kind of fragmentation that follows trauma. (Kottler and Tagashi, p. 75)
The sense of isolation that can be felt by a gifted child causes both social and psychological anguish, which in turn can become experienced as trauma. This book explores in detail through discussion and case studies the sense in which an individual can feel of ‘not being human among humans’ (Togashi and Kottler, p. 158).
In addition to exploring the concepts of twinship helpfully, an understanding of the therapeutic relationships between therapist and client is possible via the detailed accounts of extended therapy relationships.
The terminology of the content and the unusual intensity of discussion makes for a challenging read for the non-clinician or therapist. This book however has a considerable amount of content which will I feel inform practice when dealing with challenging gifted children for whom their very existence presents them with a traumatized context for explaining what it is to be ‘human’ and experience a sense of belonging and emotional relationships with others.
This book must have been extremely difficult to write as the authors themselves reveal when in the epilogue they discuss the challenge of using traditional psychoanalytical terms when seeking to make their ideas accessible. This book is not an easy read, it is challenging in many ways. Notwithstanding these observations, it is a worthwhile and informative book for those of us working with gifted students as we try to make authentic learning relationships that lay the foundations for dealing with the dilemma of making their own meaning for what it means to be a human being. Our patients and ourselves long for the experience of “feeling at home”; but the feeling is organized on a knife’s-edge balance between I and Thou, between the similarities and the differences, the connectedness and the disconnectedness, and between the necessity and the contingency of our meeting. (Kottler and Togashi, p. 171)