Double Mystery: the nature of twins (1995)

A set of identical-twin girls were surrendered to an adoption agency in New York City in the nineteen-sixties. The twins, who are known in psychological literature as Amy and Beth, might have gone through life in obscurity had they not come to the attention of Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent psychiatrist at New York University’s Psychiatric Institute. Neubauer, who was also an adviser to the adoption agency, believed at the time that twins posed such a burden to parents, and to themselves in the form of certain developmental hazards, that adopted twins were better off being reared apart from each other.

It was clear that such a separation would also offer Neubauer exceptional research possibilities. Studies of twins reared apart are the most powerful tool that scholars have for analyzing the relative contributions of heredity and environment to the makeup of individual human natures. Identical twins are rare, however, and twins who have been separated and brought up in different families are particularly unusual. Neubauer knew of only a handful of studies examining twins reared apart, and in many cases the twins being studied had been separated late in their childhood and reunited at some point long before the study began. Amy and Beth presented an opportunity to look at twins from the moment they were separated and to trace them through childhood, observing at each stage of development the parallel or diverging courses of their lives. Such a study might not lay to rest the ancient quarrel over the relative importance of nature and nurture, but one could imagine few other experiments that would be more relevant to understanding the mystery of the human condition.

By the time Amy and Beth were sent to their adoptive homes, an extensive team of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and observers was waiting to follow them as they moved from infancy to adolescence. Every step of childhood would be documented through psychological tests, tests of skills and abilities, school records, parental and sibling interviews, films, and the minutes of several hundred weekly conferences. Because the twins had identical genetic constitutions, the team could evaluate the effects of the environment on their personalities, their behavior, their health, their intelligence. Broadly speaking, the differences between the girls as they grew older would be a measure of the validity of the most fundamental assumption of analytical psychology, which is that experience—and, in particular, our family background—shapes us into the people that we become.

The agency that placed the children shortly after their birth informed each set of potential adoptive parents that the girl they were adopting was already involved in a study of child development, and strongly urged the adoptive parents to continue it; however, neither the adoptive parents nor the girls themselves were ever told that the subject of the study was twins. The sisters were fair-skinned blondes with small oval faces, blue-gray eyes, and slightly snub noses. Amy was three ounces heavier and half an inch longer than Beth at birth, an advantage in height and weight that persisted throughout their childhood. The girls were adopted into families that were, in certain respects, quite similar—both were Jewish, and lived in New York State. The mothers stayed at home, and in each family there was a son almost exactly seven years older than the twin. (In Beth’s family, there was an older daughter as well.) In other respects, the environments were profoundly different; notably, Amy’s family was lower middle class and Beth’s was well off. Amy’s mother was overweight, low key, and socially awkward. Although she had a compassionate side to her nature, she was an insecure mother, who felt threatened by her daughter’s attractiveness. Beth’s mother, on the other hand, doted on her daughter and spoke positively of Beth’s personality and her place in the family. The team described Beth’s mother as pleasant, youthful, slim, chic, poised, self-confident, dynamic, and cheerful. Whereas Amy’s mother seemed to regard Amy as a problem, a stubborn outsider, Beth’s mother treated her daughter as “the fun child.” She went out of her way to minimize the differences between herself and Beth, to the extent of dyeing her own hair to emphasize their similarity. The girls’ fathers were alike in many respects—confident, relaxed, at ease with themselves—but were as different as the mothers in their treatment of the girls. Amy’s father came to agree with his wife that Amy was a disappointment, whereas Beth’s father was more available and supportive.

All in all, the research team characterized Amy’s family as a well-knit threesome—mother, father, and son—plus an alienated Amy. It was a family that placed a high value on academic success, simplicity, tradition, and emotional restraint. Beth’s family, on the other hand, was sophisticated and full of energy—“frenetic” at times—and it tended to put more emphasis on material things than on education. Clearly, Beth was more in the center of her home than Amy was in hers.

And how did these identical twins in such contrasting environments turn out? As might be expected, Amy’s problems began early and progressed in a disturbing direction. As an infant, she was tense and demanding. She sucked her thumb; she bit her nails; she clung to her blanket; she cried when left alone; she wet her bed; she was prone to nightmares and full of fears. By the time she was ten, she had developed a kind of artificial quality that manifested itself in role-playing, made-up illnesses, and confusion over her sexual identity. Shy, socially indifferent, suffering from a serious learning disorder, pathologically immature, she was a stereotypical picture of a rejected child. If only Amy had had a mother who was more empathic, more tolerant of her limitations, more open and forthcoming (like Beth’s mother), Amy’s life might have turned out far better. If only her father had been more consistently available and affectionate (like Beth’s father), she might have been better able to negotiate the Oedipal dramas of latency and might have achieved a clearer picture of her own sexual role. If only her brother had been less strongly favored (like Beth’s brother), Amy would have been spared the mortifying comparisons that were openly drawn in her family. In theory, if Amy had grown up in Beth’s family, the sources of her crippling immaturity would have been erased, and she would be another kind of person—happier, one presumes, and more nearly whole.

And yet in almost every respect Beth’s personality followed in lockstep with Amy’s dismal development. Thumb-sucking, nail-biting, blanket-clenching, and bed-wetting characterized her infancy and early childhood. She became a hypochondriac and, like Amy, was afraid of the dark and of being left alone. She, too, became lost in role-playing, and the artificial nature of her personality was even more pronounced than Amy’s. She had similar problems in school and with her peers. On the surface, she had a far closer relationship with her mother than Amy had with hers, but on psychological tests she gave vent to a longing for maternal affection which was eerily the same as her identical sister’s. Beth did seem to be more successful with her friends and less confused than Amy, but she was also less aware of her feelings.

The differences between the girls seemed merely stylistic; despite the differences in their environments, their pathology was fundamentally the same. Did their family lives mean so little? Were they destined to become the people they turned out to be because of some genetic predisposition toward sadness and unreality? And what would psychologists have made of either girl if they did not know that she was a twin? Wouldn’t they have laid the blame for the symptoms of her neurosis on the parents who raised her? Finally, what did all this say about the fundamental presumptions of psychology?

The separated-twins story is a chestnut of American journalism—one that is guaranteed to gain national exposure, along with stories of pets that have trekked across the country to find their masters. The appeal of the separated-twins story is the implicit suggestion that it could happen to anyone. Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger—someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion, someone who understands us perfectly. It is not just the similarity that excites us but the difference: the fantasy of an identical twin is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other spouses; an identical twin can experience the world and come back to report about choices we might have made.

But the story has a darker and more threatening side, and this may be the real secret of its grip on our imagination. We think we know who we are. We struggle to build our characters through experience; we make ourselves unique by determining what we like, what we don’t like, and what we stand for. The premise of free will is that we become the people we choose to be. Suppose, then, we meet an Other who is, in every outward respect, ourself. It is one thing to imagine an identical Other who, having lived a separate and distinct life, has been marked by it and become different from us. But what if, in spite of all the differences, we and the Other arrive at the same place? Isn’t there a sense of loss? A loss not only of identity but of purpose? We are left wondering not only who we are but why we are who we are.

The Neubauer twin study is just one among thousands that have raised these questions. Over the last decade, there has been a tidal wave of twin-based scholarship. There are now so many scientists seeking to study twins that every August researchers set up booths under a huge tent at the Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where some three thousand browsing identicals and fraternals stop to take blood-pressure tests or fill out questionnaires. Recent studies of twinship have challenged our most entrenched views of human development and have capsized cherished beliefs about human nature—in particular, the bedrock notion that character is created by experience. But then twins have been confounding humanity from the earliest times—almost as if they were a divine prank designed to undermine our sense of individuality and specialness in the world. Twins are both an unsettling presence, because they sabotage our sense of personal uniqueness, and a score-settling presence, because their mere existence allows us to pose questions we might not have thought to ask if we lived in a world without them.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/4BZepRH