MZ womb twin survivors : mirrors and reflections

It can happen that a zygote may split  into  two miror images, creating mirror twins.
Here is a picture of mirror twins as adults. 

Notice  that one twin is taller, the other one more muscular. Identical twins are never truly identical!

Among mirror twins, one is right handed and the other left handed.  One my even have organs displaced to the opposite side, even the heart.  There are variations though, in the degree of mirroring between mirror twins. Its an inexact thing - like  so much in human reproduction where the number of variables is enormous.

Yet the mirror twin, a sure and always available mirror image of oneself, is a beautiful image to be found in song and poetry, as this beautiful  poem shows:




Do you seek out a mirror to yourself? Do you have an obsession with mirrors, or maybe you have an aversion to them.   Do you talk im the mirror for ages, talking over your problems with your mirror image?  Is your mirror image not you but a dear friend?

It has been written that 

....we seek forever that which one's imagination is creating, that which corresponds to one's own image: likeness.  The identity of sameness must be overcome, because it threatens one's own barely emerging separate being with becoming swallowed up again.  Otherness,  on the other hand, is too dangerous, for disagreement or even definition of oneself, would remove the mirroring which one needs in order to belong.  What one looks for from the other is acknowledgement of one's perceptions and one's thoughts and feelings, one's body and of the world one has created as being one's own while yet being within the range of possible experiences of the other.  This creates likeness between self and other while, at the same time, confirming the separate existence of each.

If you constantly seek out a mirror image of yourself in others, and if it upsets you terribly when people do not see the world the same way as you, or even disagree absolutely with your perception of reality, you may be a mirror MZ  womb twin survivor. Only a perfect mirror image of yourself will do - someone who "gets" you absolutely, with absolute empathy, verging on telepathy. With them you are safe, for they just know how you are feeling without you having to explain. Then the Dream of the Womb is fulfilled and your mirror twin is back again.

Faced with  someone who claims to be your friend, but who doesn't REALLY understand, who doesn't seem to listen to what is there in your heart, (so obvious to you that surely they MUST see it) is a terrible  and painful betrayal.  It precipitates you into your Black Hole where your mirror image is no longer there and you are left - alone. 

Leonardo da Vinci - the greatest womb twin survivor ever?

It is often said that Leonardo da Vinci was a genius, that he had a modern mind and invented machines far ahead of his time, even though  he lived 500 years ago, between April 15, 1452  and May 2, 1519. So today, being the anniversary of his death, I though he deserved a mention. Not just because he was so gifted as an engineer and artist but because it seems that he was a womb twin survivor - probably the greatest womb twin survivor in the world, ever.

Leonardo was born the illegitimate son of  Ser Piero, a notary. He grew up in the tiny vilage of Vinci, near Florence. 

Today in Vinci you can find

Museo Leonardiano

Leonardo Museum. This museum is considered to be one of the largest and most original collections of machines and models of Leonardo the inventor, technologist and engineer. Each model is shown together with precise references to the artist's sketches and annotations.

The machines exhibited exemplify various fields of interest: there are military machines, machines for construction, scientific instruments and machines for moving through air, water and on land. Palazzina Uzielli, a newly added section of the museum, houses the temporary exhibitions and an educational center which offers cultural programs.
BlBLIOTECA Leonardiana
A complete and specialized documentation center for the work of Leonardo da Vinci, that has facsimile reproductions of all of Leonardo's manuscripts and drawings.

His most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, hangs in the Louvre. Millions of people pass by every year to gaze at this  little painting, almost lost among the other pieces and now behind glass, but its attraction is hypnotic.

.

It has been said that the painting relies on optical illusions to do with the action and reaction of light and shade ; it has also been said ( in February this year in fact) that the face in this painting is a man, dressed as a woman.  The assumption is that the face is Leonardo himself, but female.

So now lets look at what evidence has come to us down five centuries that may explain this man in terms of being a womb twin survivor:

1. Same sex attraction. ( An early idea on this blog, 2008) There has been much speculation about this. Sigmund Freud had a great time revealing Leonardo as homosexual and wrote about it.  (Not unsurprisingly, Freud blamed his mother, but then that says more about Freud himself than anyone else. )

But what if Leonardo was the sole survivor of an identical twin pregnancy?  He was left handed and often used mirror writing, which is clear enough as a sign of monozygotic twinning, but  this idea would also explain how he sought after men much younger than himself and formed a deep bond with one of them. - the first  and most significant was "Salai"

Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (nicknamed Salai (Little Devil). Gian entered Leonardo's household around 1490 at the age of 10. Leonardo himself has recorded in MS. C the precise date of this event. "Giacomo came to live with me on St Mary Magdalene's day (22 July) 1490, aged ten years.

Salai as Saint Sebastian by Leonardo

Salai  has been  described "as an adoptive son, protégé, companion, or servant."  But it may have been a deeper need than that- a deep spiritual bond, made at considerable personal cost to Leonardo because Salai was a compulsive thief as a boy and required constant supervision.  There was no sexual union here, but the presence of Salai  seemed to be essential it seems to Leonardo's mental well being.

2. A love of the feminine?

Although he drew naked bodies often, for he studied anatomy, he seemed to know little of the female form other than the face. His men as depicted in his art were always beautiful and clearly Salai was a pretty boy.  Leonardo himself was very good looking, with  an aesthetic kind of face, and a long nose that was to be found in almost every portrait he made. 

It has been suggested that he painted pictures of himself, again and again.

As a young man

And that the Mona Lisa was a portrait of himself too.

A self portrait and the Mona Lisa superimposed

So why women? What was it about this man that he made such feminine images of men? That the one picture he never finished and kept until his death was one of himself but as a woman? 

What if, along with a lost identical half of himself there was also a sister, just a faint touch of oestrogen from another embryo nearby who was there for a while and soon gone, leaving a vague but profound impression? 

That would make Leonardo da Vinci a multiple womb twin survivor and as such  the greatest womb twin survivor in the world - ever.

 ( ...........and I didnt mention his inability to finish things, his self sabotage and his narcissism - that will have to be another blog, another time!)

King George VI - womb twin survivor?

Everyone is talking about the King's stammer, and the fact that he was once left handed but was retrained.

Does that mean he is a womb twin survivor?  There is a well-known connection between left-handedness and monozygotic ( identical)  twinning and is possible that all left-handed people are womb twin survivors.

As for his stammer, there was more to this, in that he also had a slight speech defect over the letter R. You can listen to the original speech that he made before his speech therapy in 1938 on Pathe News.

Watch movie and listen to the speech on the Pathe web site

Left handedness is said to be due to a later splitting of the original zygote, so that the split is into two mirrored halves rather than into two individuals. Conjoined twins often have mirrored organs, including having the heart on the wrong side.

There are many other left handers in the royal family today, including Prince Charles and Prince William.

My father Edmund Wigan worked with Dr Stephen Black, a neurologist, in the 1960s.  Dr Black used hypnotic regression with his patients, and one man had a stammer.  Dr Black regressed him to age 5 or so, when he began to speak normally. It was at this stage that he had been forced to write with his right hand rather than his left, which had been his preference until then. My father was most impressed by this and told us, - I have never forgotten.  I haven't been able to find a link to a published article on this, but there is some anecdotal evidence - strange, I would have thought that some research would be very easy to do.

All in all, being forced to turn yourself into your lost right-handed mirror twin would be enough to upset anyone. It has been called "child abuse" to force left handed children to write right-handed. 

A lot to think about here.  We need more research. We now know how to identify womb twin survivors and we should be looking everywhere for signs and signals, such as stammering or forced right-handedness, -  that may solve a lot of mysteries!

David Cameron: Another left-handed leader, perhaps?

I was interested to see that David Cameron, who may (or may not) be elected on 6th May to be Prime  Minister of the United Kingdom, is left-handed.  These pictures show how Brown is right handed, at least using a tennis racquet, and Cameron uses his left.

If he is elected, this means we will have another left-handed prime minster, as we had with James Callaghan and Winston Churchill.

Barack Obama is also left-handed, along with several other US presidents.  Left-handed people make good leaders, it seems.

See list here

Why bother to mention this? Well, to be left handed is a small clue to being a womb twin survivor, as is cerebral palsy. Cameron's son Ivan had cerebral palsy, so it may be in the family.........