'Three Identical Strangers' - Uncovering More Details About The Shocking Experiment Behind The Show
Three Identical Strangers, new to Netflix, is the unbelievable true story of identical triplets separated at birth as part of a secret psychological study into their development. It tells the story of David Kellman, Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland, but the haunting truth is that the study was enacted on many more sets of twins and triplets.
BAFTA-nominated Three Identical Strangers, made by filmmaker Tim Wardle, is a documentary film that has the same kinds of twists and developments as a work of fiction – only it's real, and this makes it all the more troubling.
The study, of which Kellman, Shafran and Galland were a part, was run by Dr Peter Neubauer and his Child Development Center. The study was made possible, however, by child psychologist Dr Viola Bernard.
In the 1950s, she convinced a Jewish adoption agency Louise Wise Services, to separate twins without telling the adoptive parents, as studies at the time believed this was better for all parties involved. While this rings many alarm bells, it actually wasn't illegal at the time.
What was illegal was to give information about an adoptee's biological family to the adoptive family – essentially, all adoptions were closed adoptions. Even today, though open adoptions exist, it is common practice to seal records to protect the identity of the parent making the difficult decision to place their child in adoption.
Dr Neubauer took advantage of this opportunity by creating the Child Development Center, working with Louise Wise Services and tracking the babies adopted into separate families as part of a wide-scale nature vs nurture study. In most cases, twins and triplets were specifically placed in families of similar make up but vastly different socio-economic statuses.
This is all revealed in the documentary and induces rage in many viewers. Ironically, however, what the documentary does is highlight the need for continued research into early childhood psychology.
Speaking to the New Scientist, psychiatrist Leon Hoffman said: "People can invent plausible-sounding policies or interventions for human beings, but until you rigorously test them, you don't know if they're doing more harm than good."
Now we know it is better to keep children together when adopting, but in the 1950s the opposite was thought to be true. The continued monitoring of the children, nevertheless, reeks of something more nefarious. (Adoptive parents were told the visits were commonplace to track the children's progress when they were anything but.)
In 1995, The New Yorker published an in-depth exposé on the Neubauer twin study. In it, they reference twin girls, given the names Amy and Beth, whose personality and behavioural development was almost identical despite their very different families.
Amy was adopted into a working-class family while Beth wound up with an upper-class family. The article reads: "In almost every respect Beth's personality followed in lockstep with Amy's dismal development. Thumb-sucking, nail-biting, blanket-clenching and bed-wetting characterised 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."
Unfortunately, most of the study remains sealed at Yale University, where Neubauer left his research after his death in 2008. He had the material sealed till 2065 – it's safe to assume so that any of the children impacted would already be dead by the time the study was made public.
The papers are controlled by the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, who released a statement saying: "The Jewish Board does not endorse the Neubauer study, and we deeply regret that it took place. We recognise the great courage of the individuals who participated in the film, and we are appreciative that this film has created an opportunity for a public discourse about the study.
"For many years, The Jewish Board has been, and will continue to be, committed to providing people who were involved with the Neubauer study access to their records in a timely and transparent manner. To date, we have provided records to all individuals who were subjects of the study who have sought them."
10,000 pages of research were released to Bobby and David. However, much of the material was redacted, leaving the siblings with little more information than they had to start with.
Shafran told the LA Times: "The data was collected but the results were never published, and we're getting to a point where we're pretty sure that nothing was ever done with it. And then what was the whole point of this, right? All this observation, collecting all this data, and no conclusions?"
For the triplets at the heart of Three Identical Strangers, the ramifications of the study are still being felt. One thing they did discover in the research is they all suffer from "Amblyopia, a condition in which the brain and eye are out of sync, resulting in a lazy eye. But only [David] Kellman was treated for the ailment — a fact that infuriates the siblings" (via the LA Times).
Of the study, Three Identical Strangers' producer Becky Read told CNN: "There's a huge amount of personal stuff in those records that are private for a reason. To access their records for the first time in years... that, I think, has been an accomplishment to them. To have some sense of ownership of this after having no control for many years over how their lives were orchestrated."
Wardle, who has always been interested in Psychology, told the Irish Times: "From what little I've seen [of the study] and from talking to people who worked on it, those two things [psychoanalysts trying to do a scientific study] didn't particularly fit together. Psychoanalytic theory isn't scientifically rigorous. The data I've seen is a mix of hard data – birth weight, IQ, things like that – mixed with psychobabble about stages of development."
Three Identical Strangers' impact, beyond being a jaw-dropping watch, has been very real. After seeing the movie in cinemas, 54-year-old Michele Mordkoff began to wonder if she had a twin, as she had been adopted from Louise Wise Services, too.
After a DNA test and a search on Ancestry.com, she found her fraternal twin sister Allison Kanter. Like the triplets, the sisters felt an instant connection. Kanter told CNN: "Twenty-five years ago would have been great [to meet Michele], but I don't know that I could've handled this at 18, 19 years old – when the boys [in Three Identical Strangers] met each other."
After living with depression for a long time, Eddy Galland died by suicide in 1995 at age 33. For years, neither Bobby or David spoke, and when Wardle began making the movie they "definitely weren't talking much during the filming process. They had a very fractured relationship for a long time" (via Vulture).
This is actually more common than you'd think. Wardle told Metro: "One of the fascinating things we learnt was a lot of the other people in the study, the ones that we know about that aren't in the film that we spoke to, when they first met after being reunited with their twin they were incredibly close and had this close relationship.
"But almost all of them have fallen out since. It is almost as if the human brain can't cope with meeting a clone of yourself in the 20s or 30s. They just didn't have the experience of growing up together to work out all of their issues. It is hard to do it later in life."
However, since making the film Kellman and Shafran have been working on maintaining their friendship. Kellman told the LA Times they had "a reason to spend more time together and work harder on our relationship."
Three Identical Strangers is available to watch on Netflix
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