Peter B. Neubauer

Background

Neubauer was born in Krems an der Donau, Austria, in 1913. He began medical studies at the University of Vienna and, after the Anschluss made completing them in Austria impossible, finished at the University of Bern in 1938. He emigrated to the United States in the 1940s and trained as a psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, where he became part of the postwar generation of émigré clinicians who would dominate American psychoanalysis for the next half-century. He maintained throughout his career a close intellectual relationship with Anna Freud and was, for decades, a co-editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, the journal she helped establish.

The Child Development Center

In 1951, Neubauer became director of the Child Development Center, a research and clinical institution affiliated with the Jewish Board of Guardians (later the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services). He held the directorship until 1985 — thirty-four years. The Center conducted both clinical practice and research, and Neubauer’s leadership defined the kind of work it took on. The twin study was its most consequential project and, in retrospect, the one that came to define Neubauer’s legacy more than any of his published writing.

His role in the study

Neubauer was the program’s principal investigator. He set its research agenda, supervised its staff, and served as the institutional figure to whom the work answered. The collaboration with Viola Bernard, who served as consulting psychiatrist to Louise Wise Services, gave the program access to the subjects it required. Neubauer’s position at the Child Development Center gave the program the institutional cover and the funding pipeline to operate at scale.

He wrote and spoke about the underlying questions of the study throughout his career — how identical genetic endowment expresses itself differently across different families, how character takes shape in early childhood — but he did not, in his lifetime, publish the synthesis the data was meant to support. His public statements about why have varied. He pointed at times to the changed climate of research ethics, at times to the privacy of subjects, at times to a sense that the work was not complete. He did not, in any public statement located by this archive, take the position that the design itself had been wrong.

The records

By 1990, Neubauer had arranged for the study’s records to be given to Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library, under terms that placed the collection under seal until October 25, 2065. The decision to seal the records, on those terms, was a decision Neubauer made or actively endorsed; the seal does not reflect a third party’s assessment of what the contents demand. The institution he led held the data, and the institution he led set the terms of its closure.

This is the heart of what the advocacy section of this archive addresses. The records’ status is a matter of institutional policy that can be changed. It was set by people, including Neubauer; it can be reset by people who hold the standing to do so today. Neubauer is no longer one of those people, but the institutions that absorbed his work — Yale, the Jewish Board, and the broader successors of the Child Development Center — are.

Public legacy

Neubauer’s name is now most widely known not for his published writing but for the study he did not publish. The 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers made his work publicly legible to a mass audience for the first time. He had been deceased for a decade by the time the film appeared, and his recorded statements about the study, made in earlier interviews, are the only voice he has in it.