Overview of the program.

The intellectual backdrop

The Neubauer twin study was conceived in a particular moment in American psychiatry. The dominant framework at the major eastern centers in the 1950s and early 1960s was psychoanalytic, with a strong developmental cast. The questions that mattered most — to the people running clinics, to the people training residents, to the people securing federal funding — concerned the fine-grained development of the child within the family: how character formed, how anxieties took shape, how the early years left their imprint.

Twin studies, in that environment, had an obvious appeal. Identical twins are genetically interchangeable. If you could observe them developing in different households, you could watch the family’s contribution to a child’s personality with what felt like unusual clarity — the genetic variable held constant by nature, the environmental variable varied by circumstance. The European behavior-genetics tradition, much older, had been making this argument for decades. American psychoanalytic researchers had largely held the question at arm’s length. The Neubauer program was an attempt to bring it inside the tent.

The institutional alignment

What made the program possible was less an idea than a coincidence of institutions. Peter Neubauer directed the Child Development Center, an arm of a large Jewish welfare federation that operated, among other things, a child-focused research and clinical practice. Viola Bernard was a senior figure at Columbia who served, in a long-running consultant role, as the supervising psychiatrist for Louise Wise Services, the Jewish adoption agency in New York that placed many children from Jewish unwed mothers into adoptive Jewish homes. The two figures were colleagues. Their institutions overlapped at the level of board service, professional networks, and grant collaboration.

That alignment had a specific consequence. The agency had a steady, if small, flow of identical multiples — twins, on rare occasions triplets — surrendered for adoption. The agency’s consulting psychiatrist, Bernard, took the position that placing such siblings in separate homes was not merely defensible but actively in their interest. The research center, run by Neubauer, had a research interest in subjects of exactly that kind. The two interests fit. Whether one drove the other has been argued for decades. The records, if read, would settle that question.

The design

The study was longitudinal and observational. Once a set of twins or triplets had been placed in separate adoptive homes — without the adopting families being told about siblings — the research team conducted recurring home visits. Each child was observed at structured tasks, given age-appropriate cognitive and personality assessments, and filmed at intervals. The adoptive parents were interviewed about the child’s development and about their own family life.

The data so produced was held inside the institution and organized for cross-twin comparison. The researchers, in effect, maintained a parallel dossier for each subject. None of the subjects, and none of their adoptive parents, knew that the dossier existed in a comparative form. Each family understood the visits as an idiosyncratic but benign form of agency follow-up.

The disposition of the work

The study did not produce a culminating publication. Neubauer wrote and spoke about the underlying questions throughout his career, but the dataset itself was never analyzed in public. He explained, in later interviews, that he had not published in part because the climate of research ethics had moved against him: a study of that design, presented in 1985 or 1995, would have been received as a scandal. He maintained, at the same time, that the work itself had been justifiable in its day and that releasing the records would compromise the privacy of subjects who had not asked to be part of any public conversation.

That second argument has weight only up to a point. The subjects’ privacy is, in fact, the strongest argument for releasing material to the subjects themselves rather than for keeping it sealed against them. The argument as Neubauer made it — and as the institutions holding the records have continued to make it — protects the institutions, not the people whose lives the records describe.