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Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are
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Critical acclaim for Lawrence Wright's
A Rhone-Poulenc Science Prize Finalist
"This is a book about far more than twins: it is about what twins can tell us about ourselves."—The New York Times
"With plenty of amazing stories about the similarities and differences of twins, Wright respectfully shows, too, how their special circumstance in life challenges our notions of individuality. A truly fascinating but sometimes spooky (Mengele's experiments with twins at Auschwitz figure among Wright's examples) study."—American Library Association
"Like so much of Wright's work, this book is a pleasure to read. Because he writes so well, without pushing a particular point of view, he soon has you pondering questions you have tended to comfortably ignore."—Austin American-Statesman
"Informative and entertaining . . . a provocative subject well considered by a talented journalist."—Kirkus Reviews
ISBN-13: 9781630262457
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Publication Date: 02-01-1999
Pages: 208
Product Dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)
LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, and Texas Monthly. He is the author of three previous books, including In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties; Saints and Sinners; and the critically acclaimed Remembering Satan. Mr. Wright received the National Magazine Award for reporting in 1993.
TWO LIVES--
ONE PERSONALITY?
A pair of identical twin girls were surrendered to an
adoption agency in New York City in the late 1960s. 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
Psychoanalytic Institute and a director of the Freud
Archives. Neubauer 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 raised separately, with no knowledge of
their twinship.
Neubauer also recognized the exceptional research
possibilities such a separation offered. Studies of twins
reared apart are one of the most powerful tools that
scholars have to analyze 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 was aware of a
mere handful of studies examining twins reared apart, and
in most cases the twins being studied had been separated
for only part of their childhoods and
were reunited at some point long before the study began.
Here was 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. Because the
sisters shared the same genetic makeup, one could
evaluate the environmental effects on the twins'
personalities, their behavior, their health, their
intelligence. Such a study might not set to rest the ancient
quarrel over the relative importance of nature versus
nurture, but there were few other experiments one could
imagine that would be more pertinent to an understanding
of the human condition.
Neubauer sought out other instances in which newborn
twins were being placed for adoption, eventually adding
three other pairs of identical twins and a set of identical
triplets to his project. The complete study has never been
published, and Neubauer is reluctant to discuss the details
of how he enlisted twins into the project. Indeed, much of
the history of the study has been kept secret. In any case,
by the time that Amy and Beth were sent to their adoptive
homes, there was already an extensive team of
psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, observers, and
testers waiting to follow them as they moved from
infancy to adolescence. Every step of childhood would be
documented through psychological and ability tests,
school records, parental and sibling interviews, films, and
the minutes of nearly 1,000 weekly conferences. Not
surprisingly, the study was slanted toward
psychoanalytical concerns. "In particular, we were looking
for the psychological variables which influence
developmental processes," says Neubauer. One would
expect identical children placed in separate environments
to be formed by different family dynamics. Broadly
speaking, the personality differences between
the girls as they grew older would measure the validity of
the most fundamental assumption of clinical psychology,
which is that experience--and, in particular, our family
background--shapes us into the people we become.
The agency that placed the children shortly after their
birth informed the potential adoptive parents that the girls
were already involved in a study of child development,
and the parents were strongly urged to continue it;
however, neither the parents nor the girls themselves
would ever be told that they were 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 taller than Beth at
birth, an advantage in weight and height that persisted
throughout their childhood. The girls were adopted into
families that were, in certain respects, quite similar. They
were placed in Jewish homes 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 sister as well.) In other
respects, the environments were profoundly different:
notably, Amy's family was lower class and Beth's was well
off. Amy's mother was overweight and socially awkward.
Her personality was flat and her self-esteem was low.
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 for the entire ten years of
the study 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." Instead of
separating Beth from other members of the family, Beth's
mother went out of her way to minimize the differences,
to the extent of dyeing her own hair to emphasize their
similarities. The girls' fathers were very much like each
other--confident, relaxed, at ease with themselves--but
different 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.
Amy's brother was a handsome academic star, the golden
boy of the family. Beth's brother, however, was a
disturbed child who suffered from learning disabilities
and uncontrolled behavior that got him expelled from
several schools and in trouble with the law. 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, full of
energy--"frenetic" at times--and it tended to put more
emphasis on materialism than on education. Clearly, Beth
was more at 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 until
she was four and continued to have "accidents" for several
years more. She was prone to nightmares and full of fears.
By the age of ten, when the study concluded, she had
developed a kind of artificial quality that manifested itself
in role-playing, gender confusion, and invented illnesses.
Shy, indifferent, suffering from a serious learning
disorder, pathologically immature, she was a
stereotypical picture of a rejected child. The team
proposed that if only Amy had had a mother who had
been more empathetic, more tolerant of her limitations,
more open and forthcoming (like Beth's mother), then
Amy's life might have turned out far better. If only her
father had been more consistently available and
affectionate (like Beth's father), then she might have been
better able to negotiate the oedipal dramas of childhood
and achieve 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 been raised in Beth's family,
the sources of her crippling immaturity would have been
erased, and she would have been another kind of
person--happier, one presumes, and more nearly whole.
In nearly every respect, however, 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, if anything, more pronounced than that of 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 did with hers, but on psychological tests she
gave vent to a longing for maternal affection that 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 connected to 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 inherent
genetic predisposition toward sadness and unreality? And
what would psychologists have made of either girl if they
had not known that she was a twin? Wouldn't they have
blamed the symptoms of her neurosis on the parenting
styles of the family she grew up in? What does that say
about the presumptions of psychology?
Twins pose questions we might not think to ask if we
lived in a world without them. They are both an unsettling
presence, because they undermine our sense of individual
uniqueness, and a score-settling presence, because their
mere existence allows us to test certain ideas about how
we are the way we are. Every culture has had to confront
the twin phenomenon and come to its own response.
Often that response has been to kill the children and to
ostracize or kill the mother as well--an implicit
acknowledgment of the threat twins can pose to the
presumptions of an established order. From ancient times
men have been known to cut off one of their testicles in
the mistaken belief that it would eliminate the possibility
of twin conceptions. Other cultures worship twins as a
divine gift; for instance, the voodoo practitioners of West
Africa and Haiti exalt twins as supernatural beings with a
single soul, who are to be revered and feared. Once a year
anyone connected to twins, living or dead, is obligated to
make offerings at a ceremonial feast in their honor to
avoid "chastisement." In our own culture, we tend to dote
on twins and mythologize their specialness through
daytime talk shows, which turn them into freaks but which
also, to be fair, provide a forum to marvel at the wonder
and the mystery of the twin event. Perhaps all these
responses are ways of holding twins at bay, since too
close a study of twinship might lead to discoveries about
ourselves that we are unwilling to make.
In the mid-sixties, when Neubauer began his enquiry into
the lives of separated twins, there were no major U.S. twin
registries; now the University of Minnesota keeps track of
more than 8,000 twin pairs; Virginia Commonwealth
University operates the "Virginia 30,000," which follows
15,000 twin pairs plus their siblings, spouses, and parents;
there are major registries in Kansas, California, and
Kentucky, and smaller ones all over the country. The
Veterans Administration maintains records of all twins
who served in the Second World War and Vietnam.
Pennsylvania State University, with several other
institutions, oversees the Black Elderly Twin Study, which
uses Medicare records to track down black twins
throughout the United States. It is the only large-scale
ethnic study in the country, but it may also become the
largest study of genetics and aging among women in the
world. In Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and
Australia nearly every twin in the country has been
identified. Moreover, in recent years, the technical
analysis of twin studies has become increasingly
sophisticated and subtle, often taking into account
multiple environmental factors, non-twin relatives, and
long-term observations. As a result of the variety and
complexity of twin studies, along with powerful tools for
analysis, the field of behavioral genetics has caused a
revolution in the universities that has spilled into political
life, reshaping the way our society views human nature and
changing the terms of the debate about what government
can and should do to improve the lives of its citizens.
Much of the argument over individual differences in
intelligence, for instance, arises from the variation
between IQ test scores of identical and fraternal twins, the
difference being a measure of how much of what we call
intelligence is inherited. The field of psychology has been
shaken by separated-twin studies, such as the one of Amy
and Beth, suggesting that the development of an
individual's personality is guided by his genes, with little
regard for the family in which he is raised. Matters that
instinctively seem to be a reflection of one's personal
experience, such as political orientation or the degree of
religious commitment, have been shown by various twin
studies to be partly under genetic control. Because of the
growth of twin studies, and also adoption studies, which
examine unrelated individuals reared together (and which
complement the study of twins reared apart), the field of
behavioral genetics has been able to study traits such as
criminality, alcoholism, smoking, homosexuality,
marriage and divorce, job satisfaction, hobbies, fears; the
results suggest that there are significant genetic
contributions in all cases. Even disciplines such as
linguistics and economics have seized upon twins as a way
of understanding language formation (by looking at twins
who create a private idiom), or of calculating the
additional earning potential of higher education (by
comparing twins who go to college versus twins who
don't). There is an air of irrefutability about such studies
that make them so appealing. When Linus Pauling
proposed that vitamin C could cure the common cold, for
instance, twin pairs were separated into two groups, one of
which received vitamin C and the other a placebo. Both
caught colds, which effectively destroyed Pauling's
theory. There are now so many scientists seeking to study
twins that the annual festival of twins in Twinsburg, Ohio,
allows researchers to set up carnival tents, where browsing
twins can stop to take stress tests or fill out
questionnaires about their sex lives. Festival organizers
even sponsor a prize for the best research
project. Last year 90,000 people--most of them
twins--attended the event.
All this comes after several decades of heightened
political struggle between those, on the one hand, who
believe that people are largely the same and that
differences are imposed upon them by their environment,
and those, on the other hand, who conclude that people
differ mainly because of their genes, and that the
environments they find themselves in are largely of their
own making or choosing. Obviously, the roots of liberal
versus conservative views are buried in such presumptions
about human nature.
This argument has been raging for centuries, with
science entering evidence on either side and public
opinion shifting in response. Using twins, and also data
derived from adoption studies, scientists can now estimate
what proportion of the variation in our intelligence, our
personality, our behavior, and even seemingly random life
events such as bankruptcy or the death of a spouse, might
be caused by inherited tendencies. The broad movement
from environmentalism to genetic determinism that has
occurred in psychology over the last thirty years has
foreshadowed the increasingly popular belief that people
are genetically programmed to become the way they are,
and therefore little can be done, in the way of changing the
environment, that will make an appreciable difference in
improving test scores or lowering crime rates or reducing
poverty, to name several conspicuous examples.
The hallmark of liberalism is that changes in the social
environment produce corresponding changes in human
development. But if people's destinies are written in their
genes, why waste money on social programs? Such
thinking has led to a profound conservative shift in the
last thirty years. This can be demonstrated by
comparing the shifting climate of opinion in the United
States, which in 1965 produced the Great Society--a vast
number of social programs designed to improve the health
and welfare of the poor, the elderly, and the minority
populations--and in 1995 brought about the Contract
with America, which generated cutbacks in many of those
same programs and marked a change in attitude about what
government can be expected to do for its citizens. These
changes have taken place not only in the West but in many
other countries as well. Indeed, the widespread retreat of
communism as a force in world politics is doubtlessly
linked to the collapse of faith in social engineering,
caused by the failure of communism to create the positive
changes expected of it.
The genetic idea has had a tumultuous passage through
the twentieth century, but the prevailing view of human
nature at the end of the century resembles in many ways
the view we had at the beginning. That is that people are
largely responsible for their station in life, and that
circumstances do not so much dictate the outcome of a
person's life as they reflect the inner nature of the person
living it. Twins have been used to prove a point, and the
point is that we don't become. We are.
Read an Excerpt
Table of Contents
Two Lives--One Personality?
The Nature-Nurture Wars.
The Secret Study.
The Minnesota Experience.
The Critics Respond.
Twin Mysteries.
The Same, but Different.
The Emotional Life.
The Environment We Make.
Beyond Nature versus Nurture.
Bibliography.
Index.
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