Three Identical Strangers is a documentary film on US cinema release about identical boy triplets, deliberately separated at their adoption when six months old as a psychological experiment on nature and nurture. One went to a working-class family, one middle-class, one wealthy and the adoptive parents were not told about the missing brothers. All the children suffered separation anxiety at the time, banging their heads against cribs; two of them were in and out of psychiatric hospitals in their teens and one was up on a robbery charge connected to a murder. They only met up by chance aged 19.
Dave Kellman, Bob Shafran and Eddy Galland were born 12 July 1961 shortly after 1 am in New Hyde Park, NY to an unmarried mother who became pregnant after a one-night stand. They became close, set up a business together in their twenties though it didn’t last and Eddy committed suicide in his mid 30s.
The psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, a renowned child expert, 5 July 1913, Austria, now dead, refused to apologise for what he’d done. He visited them separately and kept records of their development.
The boys have a New Moon in Cancer in the 3rd house which rules siblings, so the separation would have been especially painful, given Cancer’s sensitivity to letting go. Their Sun opposes Saturn in Capricorn which would leave them with low self-worth. Most significantly they have a frustrated, enraged Mars Pluto conjunction square Venus – producing a turmoil of dark feelings.
Neubauer was also a Sun Cancer in an expansive, over-confident opposition to Jupiter; with a heavily aspected, immoveable Mars in Taurus on the focal point of a Fixed T Square to Mercury in Leo opposition Uranus. His Mars was conjunct the boys’ Ascendant. He worked with Anna Freud in London who was also involved in the study of the triplets. Born 3 Dec 1895, also Austria, she had Mars, Uranus, Saturn in Scorpio so not exactly sentimental or open to argument.
The relationship chart between Neubauer and the boys has a composite Mars square Saturn with Mars trine Uranus – Mars Saturn hints at cruelty; Mars Uranus at explosive anger.
Nuebauer’s ideas were extreme even for the time and several adoption agencies refused him permission to split other twins and triplets for his study. He did nothing to help the growing boys when they developed problems and his results were never published. Of the three brothers, one is a lawyer, the other an insurance agent. The one who suicided did not get on with his adoptive father and was most affected by the reunion and finding his real family. He had bi-polar disorder. One of the adoptive fathers said they would have been more than happy to take all three boys which makes it all the more tragic.
Appreciate the synopsis, now I will never be tempted to watch this documentary film. Horrid man, exploiting children with his wicked experiments.
Such casual wickedness – beggars belief.
“Casual wickedness” – the definition of evil. Well, one of them.