TWINS by WILLIAM VINEY

Author:WILLIAM VINEY
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

8 Dorothy Burlingham (left) and her twin sisters, 1898.

The twin children Burlingham worked with displayed problems that she identified as being connected to having a twin sibling, problems that she thought sprang from being a twin. If a problem of identification, attachment, neurotic dependency or anxiety was observed in these children, twinning was to blame.37 Her work was celebrated by leading psychologists of the time as groundbreaking and conclusive; Donald Winnicott (1896–1971) declared it ‘probably the most comprehensive work of its kind in existence’.38 From this clinical psychoanalytic point of view, twins and higher-order multiples such as triplets or quads are better off going it alone. The experimental design of Neubauer’s research cannot be separated from the assumption that the single-born psychological development of an ‘individual’ was taken as the standard and norm by which twins and triplets were judged.

Little thought seems to have gone into the long-term psychological effects of separating twins and keeping their status as research subjects a secret. Unpublished, the Neubauer study archive was bequeathed to Yale University when Neubauer died in 2008 and was embargoed until 2066. Bobby and David fear they will never know the truth about what happened to them. Eddy never will: his brothers link his suicide in 1995 to his inability to cope with a past whose unification was impossible, insurmountable. The history of twin studies is rarely written by those who take part in them as witnesses and primary data sources. Such histories, if they could be written, would act as a reminder that the history of science is never complete but is continuously reinscribed into different pasts and possible futures. Like other twin stories saturated in sensation, celebration and discovery, touched by weird narrations of magic and coercion, the story of these brothers puts more than Peter Neubauer’s twin study in the open. Since the release of Three Identical Strangers, campaign groups and legal cases have been awakened; people have discovered they have siblings and have been reunited with one another. Many audiences have confronted the history of post-war human experimentation and its lasting effects on people’s lives.

It is important to shun the simplistic idea that eugenics, race science and other kinds of violence, linked to science conducted with human twins, came to an end in 1945. Likewise, it is important to scrutinize the companion assumption that unethical research is unique to fascist politics. One legacy of the Nuremberg trials has been to put Nazi race science in a past tense. And contemporary twin researchers themselves are eager to put distance between their work and the most unethical practices associated with their research methods.39 And yet the influence of Nazi-era research is still felt in a number of academic disciplines, not only in the techniques and comparative principles used but in the ways findings are gathered, disseminated and discussed. Verschuer, Grebe and Mengele escaped prosecution. Verschuer was given safe haven to launder his reputation in the city of twins, Rome, by collaborating with the Italian physician, politician and eugenicist Luigi Gedda (1902–2000).

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