Feral children and autistic Children--Bettelheim blames parents

Scholars have been fascinated for centuries about stories of children seemingly brought up by wild beasts (so-called "feral" children). If, indeed, these stories are true, what does this tell us about our so-called "uniqueness" as humans? Is it "compromised" or even "enhanced" by this strange upbringing? But, even more basically, are these stories verifiable or simply the kind of "tall tale" people tell to keep conversations going on a long night? One of the classic early anthropological descriptions of such a person was The Wild Boy of Aveyron, a book which described the life of "Victor," a boy who apparently had lived his whole childhood in the woods before being discovered in 1797.

The frenzy continued into the 20th century, and it caught Bettelheim's attention in the late 1950s after a colleague at the University of Chicago, Prof. William Ogburn, had verified to his satisfaction that a so-called "feral" child of "Agra" in India was indeed not such a child. Ogburn gave the evidence of his visit to India to Bettelheim, and Ogburn's story was published in the March 1959 edition of the prestigious journal (which was put out at the University of Chicago, by the way) The American Journal of Sociology. Bettelheim ("B") then wrote an article, published with Ogburn's piece, in which he claimed that Ogburn's story made him think about yet another story of feral children, described in scholarship as the "two famous wolf girls of Mindapore [also India], Amala and Kamala."

Reflecting further on that latter story made something click for B, something that made "scales falll from his eyes" [a reference to the Biblical story of St. Paul's conversion] when he read it. He realized that the author who first attributed feral origin to these wolf girls of Mindapore had correctly described the children but had made a basic error in "interpretation," AJS 64 (1959) at 456. Bettelheim, who criticized the author for a wild imagination, would clarify the interpretation in his own imaginative way. All you have to do is read the title of his article, and you see the direction B wants to take the story: "Feral Children and Autistic Children." B would argue that rather than being feral, these children of popular mythology and historical experience shared many traits with autistic children whom he was currently studying, with the aid of a Ford Foundation grant, at the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago.

My goodness. All of a sudden you have one of the rarest and most exotic of human phenomena (feral children) being interpreted in the context of a very rare phenomenon which was being studied, right this very minute, in the tame, controlled and scientific setting of the University of Chicago. This wonderful concatenation of circumstances gave B the opportunity to give the breathless reader a window into his laboratory (but don't visit, please!) and solve two perplexing phenomena--the origins of stories of feral children and the origins of autism. With the mere flick of a pen, B was seemingly opening new intellectual and imaginative vistas. And, to be sure, he was placing himself and his institute at the 'cutting edge' of the 'scientific examination' of autism.

A larger coup could barely be imagined. Oh, take that back. An even larger coup was effected when, in the very next issue of the AJS, world-renowned anthropologist Dr. Margaret Mead, wrote in to commend B for his work. But let's not get ahead of ourselves; let's see what B does in this article and how he argues. The "bottom line," for those of you who are impatient, is that B will attribute the "feral" or "autistic" behavior of the children to parents who secretly didn't want the child.

How Bettelheim Argues in "Feral Children"

In B's mind you don't have to go to India and argue for or against the existence of feral children to come up with the picture that the Indian author describes. Indeed, all you have to do is to got to Hyde Park, the U of Chicago, where you have autistic children who:

"keep their wild looks for months. They can and do tear off all their clothes in minutes. Even after years with us the well-groomed hair of one of our autistic girls could, within hours, turn into a 'hideous ball of matted hair,' [he is quoting the author who wrote about the Mindapore girls], glued into a mass by saliva, remnants of food, dirt and what not...." p. 457.

Throughout the article, then, B draws back the curtain a slight bit to give the reader a sort of "tour of horrors," or, more appropriately, "tour of interesting curiosities" which inhabit his school. In all cases except one the behavior of his autistic children mimics that of the wolf girls of Mindapore. The difference? The wolf girls never really learned to walk on two feet; B's autistic children walked on two feet. But, in a number of ways, the correlation between the two was, for B, striking. Of course, you had to take B's word for it in the description of his children, but his writing was so vigorous and pointed, his passion so clear, his desire for understanding so evident that he surely seemed to know what he was talking about.

Further "Interpreting" the Data

Not content to stop with drawing some possible parallels between the girls of Mindapore and his own autistic charges, B presses on. Why were these girls exposed? Well, B was ready with an answer:

"Our own experience sugggests the explanation that the girls in question were probably utterly unacceptable to their parents for one reason or another. This is characteristic of all autistic children, no matter what age. the parents manage to disengage themselves from them by placing them in an institution (as is the usual case in the US today), or by setting them out to fend for themselves in the wilderness, or, the most likely explanation, by not pursuing when they run away," p. 457.

Then, lest you missed the acid tone towards parents, comes this line:

"Our experience with the parents of autistic children, many of whom are well educated, good, middle-class people, leaves little doubt that in their deepest emotions they wished to be rid of them and for very good reasons," Ibid.

All of this is said with an authoritative air, as if it was a proven scientific fact that parents of autistic children "wished to be rid of them..." Not only has he inappropriately made cross-cultural comparisons, but he hasn't given a shred of evidence for what he argues. In fact, he will build on a point made earlier by Kanner, that there is a remarkable "coldness" in many families of autistic children, and then add to it that this coldness means the parents want the child dead and that the child, perceiving all this, "retreats" into autism as a defense mechanism. Damn the parents! We can see B dripping with scorn and even hatred, for these misguided parents.

But, there is more. Let's "finish" this in the next essay.

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