In graduate school I’d read The Wild Boy of Aveyron, an account of a ten to twelve year old who was captured in 1799 by French peasants in the forest where he had been living. The child acted like a wild animal running around on all fours, eating off the ground, smelling everything. There have been other published cases of abandoned kids, found living in the wild, like Amala and Kamala, the so-called “Wolf Children” found in India in the 1920s and “Wild Peter” discovered in Germany in 1724. Bruno Bettelheim argues that these wild or feral children were really abandoned autistic children. Since they couldn’t speak, it was assumed by the people who found them that these kids were raised in the wild by animals. There is some doubt about authenticity of these cases. None of them responded to "therapy" and their behavior was similar to more recent, confirmed cases of isolation and deprivation: infants and young children who have been kept in captivity, locked up in small rooms, closets, or attics, isolated from the outside world, and oten abused. I often wondered if these accounts of feral children led Bettelheim to propose his refrigerator theory of autism back in the forties. I had dinner with him in the seventies and asked him directly. But he was a grouchy depressed man and waved his hand at me and would not answer.
(See "Wild Child" at www.aba4autism.com)
