Eyes that see the good in things: July 22, 2019

The connection that twins exhibit has long fascinated me. Our family tree has many sets of twins, and I watched with interest when one family would come to family reunions with two sets of twins. The fascination continues. .

I loved hearing the stories about my mother-in-law and the extremely close relationship she shared with her identical twin sister. They were born at a time when money was very tight, to parents who already had three children. One of those children had special needs, so this young mom already had an extremely full plate. When she found out that she would be having twins, she didn’t see how she would be able to raise them both herself.

Though it broke her heart to do it, she made arrangements for one of the twin babies to be raised by a family member. However, it was an arrangement she found she couldn’t honor, and she kept both of the girls and raised them together.

Given my interest in twins, it was so exciting when my twin nephews were born. I still read almost every article that I see written about twins and have recently come across a few that were unsettling. One article that I read referred to a documentary film called “The Twinning Reaction,” which is a feature length documentary film about a failed human research experiment from the 1960s. It involved identical twins who were separated in infancy and then secretly studied by psychologists for many years. The film’s website says, “the film provides an inside look at the dangers of medical arrogance and the enduring bonds of twinship.”

The story began in 1960, when two prominent psychoanalysts, Dr. Peter Newbauer and Dr. Viola Bernard, began a secret study involving orphaned babies from a New York City adoption agency. The doctors separated five sets of twins without telling the adoptive parents.

Over the years, researchers filmed and interviewed the children and families for years, all under the pretense of conducting an adoption study. It was a nature versus nurture study of twins separated in infancy.

Some of these twins have reunited by sheer luck, others through the filmmaker’s work on this story. A common theme among all the twins is the enduring pain surrounding their childhood separations, exhibiting troubling behavior, head-banging, rocking, holding their breath until they passed out, as well as profound sadness. At least three individuals have taken their own lives.

The focus of the film shows Doug Rausch and Howard Barack, in their quest for answers about the twin study and its findings. With the help of attorneys, the twins obtained access to their own secret study files, which are sealed at the Yale University Archives until the year 2066.

“I grew up in a nice, upper-middle-class family in a nice, suburban area north of New York City, in Rockland County, and normal childhood, normal whatever, great parents,” said Burack, who was born in 1963. Burack always knew he was adopted and that his parents adopted him when he was a baby from Louise Wise Services, a prominent New York City Jewish adoption agency.

However, his view of his adoption changed when he made a routine inquiry to the adoption agency, requesting his birth records, and was told that somewhere in the world he had an identical twin brother but was also told that, by law, they could not release his twin’s name.

Doug Rausch was also adopted through Louise Wise Services, by George and Helen Rausch. They were told the child would continue to be monitored throughout his lifetime. George Rausch said he felt there was a certain amount of coercion to permit the monitoring, as they believed they would not otherwise have been approved.

“They made it sound like this was to everybody’s benefit, because we were adopting a child we didn’t know. We didn’t know his background, but it never dawned on me why they’re coming back so many times,” Helen Rausch said during an interview for “The Twinning Reaction.”

For a decade or more, the children and their adoptive families were visited by those mysterious researchers. The entire time, the families said they were unaware that the ir adopted child was a twin.

Burack said that the researchers were still coming to his house when he was 11 or 12 years old, and that at one point, he said he no longer wanted to participate in their research. When Burack was told that he had a twin, he said that “I spent about two years, every day, thinking about this. It never left.” He said he started looking at people he encountered in the world for a face that looked like his. He even asked people to tell him if they ever saw someone similar to him.

Doug Rausch found out about his secret history two years after Burack did. In 2000, Louise Wise Services was going out of business, and a woman who had worked there for years had cancer and knew she was dying. She said that she couldn’t go to her grave without letting kids know that they had identical twins. Doug Rausch allowed the adoption agency to give his phone number to his twin and waited to hear from the identical brother he never knew he had.

The twin brothers were finally reunited at an airport in Columbus, Ohio. When they saw each other for the first time, it was like looking at themselves in the mirror. They felt an instant connection, like they had known each other all their lives.

Meanwhile, reunited twins Rausch and Burack started demanding answers about why they had been separated and studied. The data from the study is held at Yale University under seal until 2066, and only the Jewish Board of Family and Children Services, Neubauer’s former employer, can allow them to be released before that date.

Before Neubauer died, Doug Rausch said he got the chance to talk with him on the phone and Rausch came away from the call feeling that Neubauer believed that he had done nothing wrong. While Rausch said he felt like he and others had been treated like “lab rats,” he said it “blew his mind to think that Neubauer thought, at 90 years old, that it was fine.”

Amazingly, Rausch and his twin brother, Burack, are not angry or bitter. “It would have been awesome growing up together, but we were both very lucky and are not looking backward,” he said. They’ve decided to share their story, so that other twins who may have been split up can find each other and to make sure something like this never happens again.

We would love to share local stories about the good things your eyes are seeing.

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