Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

a disgusting, slovenly boy, affected with spasmodic, and frequently with convulsive motions, continually balancing himself like some of the animals in the menagerie, biting and scratching those who contradicted him, expressing no kind of affection for those who attended upon him; and, in short, indifferent to every body, and paying no regard to any thing. 52

Itard believed that with patient training, Victor could be integrated back into society. At first, progress looked promising as Victor started to understand spoken commands. He even managed to wear clothes. However, his ability to communicate did not develop further and after five years of intensive training, Itard abandoned his attempt to reintegrate Victor into society. Victor remained in the care of Itard’s housekeeper until his death in 1828.

Wild or feral children like Victor have periodically cropped up to stimulate public interest. What would a child without any parenting or experience of other humans be like? Would they ever acquire a language? It is reported that, in 1493, James IV of Scotland ordered two infants to the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth to be raised by a mute woman because he wanted to know what language the children would end up speaking if they never heard another human talk. According to the diarist, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, who reported the incident some years later, ‘Sum sayis they spak goode Hebrew.’ 53

Clearly feral children have been sparking the imagination of intellectuals interested in nature and nurture for centuries. It makes good fiction – remember the young boy Mowgli raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes . We are interested because we want to know the natural dispositions of humans and what they learn from the environment. What is their self like in the absence of parental influence?

One problem in answering this question is that many of these cases come from poor, isolated, rural communities and so it is difficult to get sufficient background information and details. In one of the better-documented cases from the 1970s, psychologists studied ‘Genie’, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been kept in social isolation from infancy in the backroom of her psychotic grandfather’s condo in Los Angeles. Like Victor, she had limited communication and understanding, despite the concerted attempts of speech therapists and child psychologists to rehabilitate her.

The case of Genie has been used as evidence to support the critical period of social development, but without knowing the initial state of these children, it is still difficult to draw firm conclusions. 54Maybe they were abandoned because they were already brain-damaged. In reviewing the case of Victor, child development expert Uta Frith observed that he displayed many of the characteristics of severe autism. 55We also do not know whether and to what extent early malnourishment of feral children contributes to potential brain damage. Maybe it was not the lack of social interaction so much as the damaging consequences of not being cared for by others who provide the necessary nutrition to develop normally. However, the fall of a Romanian dictator in 1989 would reveal that both physical and psychological nurturing is essential for long-term social development.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

The tiny faces peering out between the bars of the cribs shocked the Western world back in 1990 as the full atrocity of the Romanian orphanages came to light. Romania Marxist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu had outlawed birth control and ordered women to bear more children in an attempt to increase the country’s population. In an already poor economy, many of these children were simply dumped in institutions because their parents could not cope. Children in these orphanages were not only malnourished; they were also socially abandoned with no interaction with the so-called caregivers. On average there was only one caregiver for every thirty babies. The babies lay in their own faeces, fed from bottles strapped to their cots and were hosed down with cold water when the smell became unbearable. Some babies had been left lying on their backs for so long that their heads had flattened abnormally. Harvard psychologist Chuck Nelson, who headed up the US team that studied the Romanian orphanages, described the conditions as ‘breathtakingly awful’. 56Colleagues that arrived to evaluate these children were instructed not to cry in front of them. Nelson said. ‘One of the eeriest things about these institutions is how quiet they are. Nobody’s crying.’ Their normal social bonds had been broken.

When the plight of the orphans came to light, the world descended on Romania to rescue these children. Families determined to give them a better start in life brought around 300 orphans to the United Kingdom. In the United States, Nelson and his colleagues studied 136 of them. 57How would they fare? British psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter led a team that would study 111 of these children who were less than two years of age when they first came to the UK. 58There were no medical records for these orphans and there is always the problem of knowing if an individual child suffered from congenital disorders, but the research revealed some amazingly consistent findings.

When they arrived, the orphans were mentally retarded and physically stunted with significantly smaller heads than normal children. However, by four years of age, most of this impairment had gone. Their IQs were below the average for other four-year-olds, but within the normal range that could be expected. These children seemed to be largely rehabilitated. Some had done much better than others. Orphans who were younger than six months of age when they arrived were indistinguishable from other normal British children of the same age. They made a full recovery. Their window of opportunity had not yet closed when they arrived in the UK. The longer they had been in the orphanage after six months of age, the more impaired their recovery was despite the best efforts of their adopted families.

The orphans were followed up again at six, eleven and fifteen years of age. Again as a group they fared much better than expected, given their poor start, but not all was well. Those who had spent the longest time in the orphanage were beginning to show disturbed behaviour with problems forming relationships and hyperactivity. Just as Bowlby and others had predicted, the absence of a normal social attachment during infancy had left a legacy of poor social attachment as an adult. Rutter concluded that infants younger than six months recovered fully from social deprivation, but older infants were increasingly at risk of later problems in life. While malnutrition played some role in their impaired development, it could not be the only reason. When they looked at the weight of babies when they entered the UK, this did not predict their development. Rather it was the amount of time that they had been socially isolated that played a greater role. Their ability to fit in socially had been irrevocably ruined by their isolation as infants.

Can you survive without others? Possibly. Some people have survived years in isolation. But would you want to? And what about the need for others when we are children? The Romanian orphanage studies reveal that there is something deeply fundamental about our need for interaction with others that makes social psychological development essential for our well-being. Those orphans lucky enough to be rescued in time prove that with nurturing homes and care, we can recover from the misery of isolation. However, what is shocking is how quickly isolation can permanently impair our social development. It would appear that within a year of birth, each of us needs others in order to be happy for the rest of our lives. This suggests that the sense of self that emerges over development is one that carries the legacy of early social experiences because the processes that construct the individual during this sensitive period are disrupted. In other words, the developing human brain critically expects input from others and, if this is not available, it has lasting impact on the epigenesis of normal social behaviour.