For six months he remained in the care of a naturalist in Ittidez, who published a short book on him. In 1800 a naked boy was sighted roaming the woods of south‐central France and finally captured.
Scene from the Truffaut movie “The Wild Child” with Jean‐Pierre Cargol in the title role. It may be as close as we shall come to the impossible experiment. In comparison, the Wild Boy of Aveyron represents a “scientific” case history, dramatically played out in a controlled environment by a gifted medical doctor and a boy of problematic mentality. Some of the most celebrated cases, like Amala and Kamala, the Indian Wolf Girls and Kaspar Hauser, cannot be separated from a background of intrigue and fraud. Because they revert to inaccessible states of consciousness and inadmissible forms of behavior, we stand before them transfixed by an ambivalent response compounded of revulsion and identification. classification of “feral man”-all these strange creatures have long had a special place in the human imagination next to madmen and criminals. Wild children, wolf boys, bear girls, the cases Linnaeus recognized with the. Mannoni in France, have contributed new interpretationsof the case. Meanwhile important practitioners and authors in the psychological field, like Bruno BetteIheim in this country and O. His beautifully made black‐and‐white film appeared in 1970 Truffaut himself played Hard: “The Wild Child” had a reasonable box‐office success and still plays to special audiences all over the world. Francois Truffaut ran across the volume and recognized the possibilities and the fascination of the story.
Yet ltard's work was little known outside professional circles until Malson's book started a long overdue revival. The reports also had a major influence on Maria Montessori in her development of training methods for normal children. Through Edouard Seguin, who fled to the United States after the Revolution of 1848, Itard's methods have been widely and successfully applied to the “special education” of the, physically and mentally handicapped. The two obstacles that blocked further progress were speech and sex. Itard restored him to recognizable humanity. (An English translation by George and Muriel Humphrey has been available since 1932.)ĭating from 18, Itard's documents describe his partial success in educating Victor, a 12‐year‐old virtually bestial boy officially diagnosed as an incurable idiot. Jean‐Marc Itard on Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron. For the first time in 70 years Malson reprinted the French text of the two superb reports by Dr. However, it is the 100‐page appendix that made the book successful and influential. Then in 1963 a French social psychologist and jazz critic, Lucien Matson, published “Les Enfants Sauvages.” His lively essay surveys all reported cases of wild children since the Middle Ages and assesses the theories about them from Rousseau and Carolus Linnaeus to Claude Levi‐Strauss. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (For example: Ruth Benedict, “Patterns of Culture,” 1934 Claude Levi‐Strauss, “The Elementary Structure of Kinship,” 1949 Roger Brown, “Words and Things,” 1958.) Yet none of them pauses to reexamine the case with care. It is understandable that some of the most astute modern works concerned with the balance of nature and culture should open with a reference to the best documented case: the Wild Boy of Aveyron. However, the accidents of history have delivered a few such children into our hands. The experiment would be to deprive a child of all social contact from birth, or at least after the age when solitary survival becomes possible. Yet the hard‐pressed principles of Western civilization, which strive to safeguard the life and integrity of every individual human being, have generally restrained us from the one experiment that might reveal something significant about the mysterious amalgam of nature and culture in man.
Crimes against humanity are not on the wane in modem times.