…twins have a peculiar identity problem. They live the life of an artistic transparency with one of their images superimposed on the other. Having twins, I noticed how from earliest infancy they necessarily watched each other incessantly. It was impossible to do otherwise. One was always getting attention of which the other was being deprived. As they grew up I encouraged them to make notes in anecdote form about the experience of being a twin. This, of course, they refused to do. Then I began to look around in literature for anything at all on the subject of twins, and I was quite amazed to discover that there was nothing at all except "The Bobbsey Twins." Since one in eighty births consists of twins, the population of such people is vast. Add to that group their parents, and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, and you have one of the largest reading publics whatever.

At present, when the problem of identity has become a major hang-up in the cultures of the world as a result of technological and environmental changes (with corresponding loss of identity images, both private and corporate), the twin gestalt offers a major beach-head into the identity crisis which psychologists need desperately…. …I suggest that you are in a privileged position to make a creative contribution in this troubled area of identity image. It is a matter that concerns everybody, but one for which the question of twins offers a kind of "open sesame" previously unthought of.

The idea of eliciting anecdotes from twins via your column may not be a practical approach that it had appeared to me to be. At first glance it seemed that a column that reached many people could tap the untouched resources of observation of many twins. What is needed is a great collection of anecdotes, minus any point of view whatever. The anecdote can yield multitudes of diverse insights unsuspected by the narrator of the anecdote.