The study of twins / Peter Mittler.

  • Mittler, Peter J.
Date:
[1971]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The study of twins / Peter Mittler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Preface About twelve years ago, I was asked to see a pair of speech¬ less, overactive and rather wild four-year-old twin boys whose mother was near breaking point. Their intellectual functioning at that time was for all practical purposes sub¬ normal, and their tested IQs were in the low 60s. We merely advised the mother that she should treat each child as an individual, dress them differently, call them by their own names rather than refer to them collectively as 'the twins', and in general do everything possible to stress the individu¬ ality of each child. A year later, for whatever reason, their IQs had risen to around 120, they were speaking fluently and their behaviour was normal. They continued to score well above average on intelligence tests throughout their school careers. After that, I came across a number of other pairs, some of whom were seriously disturbed or psychotic, while others showed a variety of learning problems. In all cases, the quality of the relationship between the twins seemed to change continuously, so that mothers found it hard to describe one twin as consistently more dominant or more affectionate than the other. When I began to read the voluminous literature on twins, it became clear to me that many variables relating to twins and the twin situation were still unexplored, and that psycho¬ logists who used twins as pawns in the nature-nurture con¬ troversy were concentrating exclusively on differences within pairs and neglecting both the twin as an individual and the psychology of the twin pair. What factors, for example, could be related to the fact that twins tend to show delayed language development? Was it because they tend to form a