wild boy aveyron case study

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The Wild Boy of Aveyron

By Roger Shattuck

• May 16, 1976

Crimes against humanity are not on the wane in modem times. 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. 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. However, the accidents of history have delivered a few such children into our hands. 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. (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.

By Harlan Lane.

Illustrated. 351 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $15.

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. However, it is the 100‐page appendix that made the book successful and influential. For the first time in 70 years Malson reprinted the French text of the two superb reports by Dr. Jean‐Marc Itard on Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron. (An English translation by George and Muriel Humphrey has been available since 1932.)

Dating from 1801 and 1806, Itard's documents describe his partial success in educating Victor, a 12‐year‐old virtually bestial boy officially diagnosed as an incurable idiot. Itard restored him to recognizable humanity. The two obstacles that blocked further progress were speech and sex. 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 reports also had a major influence on Maria Montessori in her development of training methods for normal children. Yet ltard's work was little known outside professional circles until Malson's book started a long overdue revival. Francois Truffaut ran across the volume and recognized the possibilities and the fascination of the story. 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. Meanwhile important practitioners and authors in the psychological field, like Bruno BetteIheim in this country and O. Mannoni in France, have contributed new interpretationsof the case.

During the late 1960's and early 70's a young American psycholinguist, Harlan Lane, was teaching in France. Though neither the history of psychology nor child development was his special area, the case attracted him. He has now written the first fulllength scholarly work on the subject in any language. Several years ago, inspired in part by Truffaut's film, I began to explore the case myself with no knowledge of Lane's project. My investigations led me to undertake a non‐scholarly narrative account of the story; now nearly complete. Along the way Lane's and my paths inevitably crossed. Our books are very different in nature. I believe I can disclaim both conflict of interest and identity of interest, either of which would disqualify me from reviewing his book.

Wild children, wolf boys, bear girls, the cases Linnaeus recognized with the. classification of “feral man”—all these strange creatures have long had a special place in the human imagination next to madmen and criminals. 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. 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. 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. It may be as close as we shall come to the impossible experiment.

How much nature, how much nurture?

Scene from the Truffaut movie “The Wild Child” with Jean‐Pierre Cargol in the title role.

In 1800 a naked boy was sighted roaming the woods of south‐central France and finally captured. For six months he remained in the care of a naturalist in Ittidez, who published a short book on him. Mute, shameless, interested only in eating, sleeping and escaping, the boy was trained like a dog to a leash and housebroken to relieve himself outside. The Government then entrusted him to Roche‐Ambroise Sicard, director of the Institute for Deaf‐Mutes in Ppris and a renowned teacher. Sicard found the boy totally unresponsive and intractable. A committee of experts headed by Philippe Pine!, one of the founders of psychiatry, finally declared te boy an incurable idiot‐ He would‐ have been put away in an insane asylum if Itard. barely 25, had not quietly challenged the diagnosis and offered to take charge. For the next six years Itard devoted several hours a day to a special training program for Victor, as the boy soon came to be called. A remarkable woman by the name of Madame Guenn virtually became his foster mother

When Itard made his first report to the Society of Observers of Man after six months, he documented the vast improvement in Victor's behavior and intelligence. The next report, reluctantly written after five more years of patient training, describes drastically slowed progress in the boy, failure to learn to speak, and major obstacles to further improvement. Victor fell barely yet exasperatingly short of becoming a full human person. Twenty years later Victor died in obscurity, still a charge of the state. Bird went on to a brilliant medical career and developed methods for training the partially deaf.

Harlan Lane has really written two interlocking books on this material. The first relates the Victor‐Itard story and includes a wealth of documentary evidence collected and translated for the first time. Lane's account is more complete and reliable than any other account in any language. Yet for a reader not familiar with Itard's original reports. Lane's version becomes difficult to follow at times and would be considerably helped by a chronological table.

The second book treats Itard's Later career and his “legacy” to the special education of deaf‐mutes and the mentally retarded. Lane devotes his longest chapter to “The Great Sign Controversy” over whether the deaf from birth should be taught to use sign language or to talk through lip reading and special techniques.

Both books deal with important subject matter pertinent to our knowledge of human development, and Lane writes with enthusiasm. Yet I find that the two books—not even articulated in this volume by division into two parts—interfere with one another. So much information has to be marshalled to do justice to Victor's individual case history, and to the complex development of special education across nearly two centuries, that Lane finally must give short shrift to the biggest issues that come striding out of his account. A social scientist taking the Wild Boy of Aveyron as seriously as Lane rightly does should have made more of these issues:

1. If Victor was not retarded, then his failure to learn speech beyond the rudiments of reading and hearing comprehension constitutes a significant contribution to the “critical period” theory of language learning. This hypothesis, described and supported in Eric Lenneberg's book “Biological Foundations of Language,” posits a limited time span somewhere between age 2 and puberty during which a person can learn his first language. Victor was captured and his training began just at the onset of puberty. Every detail of his case history deserves careful scrutiny in the light of the critical period hypothesis.

2. In three or four places Lane cites and examines what Itard keeps saying about Victor's failure to imitate behavior the way most young children do in learning. But the most stunning section in Itard's second report affirms the “psychological truth” that the capacity for imitation fluctuates with age and may have disappeared in Victor for lack of reinforcement. Itard's observations in this area of learning bear comparison to recent theories like John Bowlby's on “at tachment” to a single protective figure.

3. At the end of his first report, Itard mentions that Victor's puberty has recently manifested itself “almost explosively” in recent weeks and in such a way as to “cast much doubt on the origin of certain affections of the heart that we look upon as very natural.” Behind this cryptic sentence and behind various pathetic and amusing sections of the two reports lies an unmistakable hypothesis that the essential organization of sexual behavior in humans is acquired, not instinctual. Accordingly, Victor comprehended the behavior of his sexual organs and their potential relation to the “other sex” even less than he did the possibilities of language communication. And it was sheer sexual tension, unfocused on any other person and presumably for that reason not accessible to sublimation to any other level, that helped bring an end to the training program, Lane scantsthe whole question.

4. Haltingly in his account of working with Victor, and far more explicitly in his 1828 re ports on deaf‐mutes, Itard affirms the influence of the affective or emotional development of a child on its cognitive development. His words have a rare authority when he states “how false is that opinion of certain moralists who have believed that there is nothing in common between the mind [espirit] and feelings [sentiment].”

In his eagerness to treat both Victor's story and the disputes that hang over the training of deaf‐mutes, Lane passes over these issues too rapidly. His references to present‐day thinking and research in these fields are inadequate precisely at points where the ordinary reader and the specialist would want the subject carried further.

These defects in conception and execution do not prevent “The Wild Boy of Aveyron” from being a significant and absorbing book. It goes a long way toward bringing to life the intellectual temper of France in 1800. Above all, Lane recognizes the significance and latent content of Victor's case history, and shows how clearly Itard anticipated behavior modification. The heart of the book is Chapter Seven, Lane's critical assessment of the materials he has assembled.

First, looking beyond the obvious inventiveness and patience of Itard's training program, Lane judiciously criticizes his methods and approach. He taxes Itard with isolating Victor too much from his peers in “a misguided attempt at total pedagogy,” and with not teaching him the sign language of the deaf, for which Victor showed a natural gift. Then Lane focuses on Pinel's original report, the one that classified Victor as an incurable idiot. “There are so many flaws in Pinel's argument that it is hard to understand why it has had so much weight.”

The last pages of Chapter Seven present Lane's own thesis. “It appears that Itard's original analysis in 1800 was the correct one.” Appears — one could go no further with impunity. In other words, Victor was probably normal; his speech and other acquired human skills had been extinguished by disuse during six or seven years of isolation in the woods. Some of the boy's symptoms may have resembled idiocy, but full knowlzdge of the case, of his successful, adaptation to life in the wild and of his remarkable progress for two years after capture, rule out congenital retardation as the fundamental explanation of Victor's history. Lane implies that the critical period hypothesis is far closer to the truth. At age 12 or 14 it was just too late to give the boy anything more than the rudiments of vocal speech. We shall never know if he could have learned to sign.

I agree that hard might have obtained better results by proceeding differently in the light of knowledge not available in his day. Furthermore, no one has come close to demonstrating that Victor was congenitally retarded. Yet I cannot go all the way with Lane in saying the boy was almost surely normal. The evidence remains inconclusive.

Whether Victor was normal or retarded, hard won. Lane doesn't make this circumstance clear enough. If normal, then it is thanks to Itard that we have an extensive and perceptive account of bringing the “savage” part way back to civilization. Compared to him, the lowliest Australian bushman or African Pygmy is highly civilized and surrounded by a thick sheath of cultural and social behavior. On the other hand if Victor was organically (or even functionally) retarded, then Itard performed an almost uncanny feat of redeeming the unredeemable, of finding a place for a stone the builder rejected. Either way he was the miracle worker of his era.

Most disconcerting of all, Itard may have changed his own mind about Victor. In the same 1828 memorandum about speech training for selected deaf‐mutes with residual hearing, Itard cautions that one must choose only those subjects whose intelligence, judgment, work habits and willingness to take correction have been carefully tested. “Having once been gravely mistaken on this point, I take note of it here.” In quoting the sentence, Lane suggests that it applies to Victor only insofar as he had lost the capacity to imitate. In context, however, the sentence refers to the entire case of Vic tor and signifies at least a partial reversal of Itard's original diagnosis of the boy as normal, trainable and tractable. There is no getting away from the irony that, 20 years later, hard seems to have believed he wasted six years on a misguided project. He stopped mentioning Victor in his writings. He apparently preferred to be remembered as the founder of otolaryngology.

On two factual points I find Lane is in error. Available evidence does not establish that Hard was already working at the Institute for Deaf‐Mutes when the Wild Boy arrived in Paris. Therefore Lane's opening scene of their first encounter one day in the Luxembourg Gardens is dramatically effective but hard to justify historically. Far more significant to the assessment of Itard's accomplishment is the question of where Victor lived during his six years of training. Lane places him in Itard's house with Madame Guerin as Itard's housekeeper. According to my reading of the texts, Victor remained in residence at the Institute, where Madame Guérin appears to have been the wife of an employee. Victor had his own bedroom on an upper floor where Itard often worked with him. As the years went by Victor increasingly accompanied Hard to his home and probably stayed there from time to time. But Hard's “total pedagogy” did not entail taking the boy out of the Institute, where it is difficult to discover just how much contact he had with the other inmates

The Wild Boy of Aveyron represents a unique case of total cultural deprivation, of moral nakedness: a human being stripped of education, custom, dignity, brotherhood, sex, almost of humanity itself. Lane's book succeeds in sustaining the human interest along with scientific scrutiny. The intellectual space it occupies has been empty too long, scandalously empty ever since Truffaut's sober and revealing film. We should be grateful that Harlan Lane had the wisdom to follow his hunches not the current fashions in his appointed field. ■

Author's Query

I am currently working on a biographical and critical study of American poet Elizabeth Akers (pseudonym Florence Percy), 1832‐1911, and would appreciate any information on her or on her descendants.

PATRICK BOWLES Dept. of English Marquette University Milwaukee, Wis. 53233

The Mysterious Case Of The Feral Child Victor Of Aveyron

In December of 1798, three hunters in the Tarn region of southwestern France saw what looked like a child dart up a tree. Surprised, the three men investigated and found a naked boy of about 11 hiding from them in the branches of an oak. They called out to him, but he didn't seem to register their words. Somehow they managed to pull him down and carry him into a nearby town, where they entrusted him to an elderly lady. The boy was bizarre-looking. He apparently spoke no language at all, and he had an animal's nervous mannerisms, grunting and refusing to make eye contact. 

All this was documented by one Dr. E.M. Itard, who would later take care of the boy. Itard's book, "An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man" (from 1802, available at Gutenberg ) described him as "disgusting" and "slovenly... spasmodic... like some of the animals in the menagerie, biting and scratching those who contradicted him."

Within a week, the boy had escaped the old lady. Nearby villagers spotted him skulking around wearing only the shirt he'd just been given. A clergyman had him captured and sent to Paris, where crowds gathered to see the boy soon to be called Victor of Aveyron, the most famous feral child in France.

Forever a child of the woods

France's National Institute of the Deaf and Dumb took an interest in the strange young boy and had him placed under the care of Dr. E.M. Itard, who named him Victor. Itard studied the boy's habits and concluded that like the earlier Peter the Wild Boy – who was kept as a royal pet — he had lived his whole life as an animal. His body was covered in scars, and although gunshots did not disturb him, his ears pricked at the sound of a walnut shell cracking. He adored walnuts, a taste he may have owed to the acorns and wild nuts he ate in the woods (via History ).

Itard attempted to teach Victor to speak, but the boy never quite caught on. Slowly, Victor learned to bathe, dress himself, show affection, and recognize certain French words. Nevertheless, he could not get the boy to speak more than a few grunted syllables. He never learned to say his own name.

Was this the "blank slate?"

Victor's discovery could not have been better timed. Since the middle of the 18th century, wild children and "savage" cultures had achieved a kind of cult status in Europe. British, American, and French explorers had finally come into contact with cultures that had not developed the same social and technological sophistication as Europe, India, China, and other settled civilizations. Exotic lands like Tahiti, the Edenic backdrop of the Bounty mutiny , seemed to be a remnant of mankind's childhood.

French philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (seen above) were convinced that Western civilization was a kind of fall from grace. Man was born noble and good, went the general drift; owning property and commanding others, fundamental to civilization, was what turned people wicked. In England, John Locke had argued that the human mind was a "blank slate" at birth, created by the culture around it (via Britannica ). These intellectuals pored over the world looking for examples of the "noble savages" whose "slate" had not been corrupted. 

Victor of Aveyron was one such " noble savage ," and Itard's book says explicitly that the boy represented a chance for science to explore how a mind becomes civilized. Perhaps it was inevitable that such an optimistic experiment would fail. Victor would die at 40, still non-verbal, his identity still unknown.

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The Wild Boy of Aveyron

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1976

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Feral child: the legacy of the wild boy of Aveyron in the domains of language acquisition and deaf education

Wayne Cayea

Language Acquisition has been hotly debated since Chomsky's theory of innate ability in the 1950s. Feral children. i.e.. wild children who grow up in extreme isolation, provide a unique opportunity to study the process of language acquisition. What we can learn can have a major impact on what and how we teach our young students, especially deaf - students whose language development may be delayed. Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a famous feral child, is the focus of this study. He was discovered in the French wilderness in 1800, after three to eight years alone in the forest. After five years of instruction at the Paris Institute for the Deaf, his education was abandoned. Victor never learned to speak and only ever became "half-civilized". Nevertheless, he left a tremendous legacy on the fields of education and language acquisition. His case helped develop many language acquisition theories, and numerous the techniques used in the attempt to educate him are still used in the field of education today.

Publication Date

Document type.

Master's Project

Student Type

Christie, Karen

Advisor/Committee Member

Schley, Sara

Bateman, Gerald

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in December 2013.

Recommended Citation

Cayea, Wayne, "Feral child: the legacy of the wild boy of Aveyron in the domains of language acquisition and deaf education" (2006). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology. Accessed from https://repository.rit.edu/theses/4159

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Wild Boy of Aveyron

A French feral child who was captured in 1800 at the estimated age of twelve. A young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, worked with the boy for five years and gave him his name, Victor. Itard was interested in determining what Victor could learn and devised procedures to teach words and recorded his progress. Based on his work with Victor, Itard broke new ground in the education of the developmentally delayed. Victor is estimated to have been born around 1788 and Itard reported he was a normal child at birth but later he was neglected by his alcoholic parents at an early age, and he left to the wild. Recent commentary by Uta Frith, a German developmental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, postulates that Victor displayed signs of autism.

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Man or bear? Hypothetical question sparks conversation about women's safety

Women explain why they would feel safer encountering a bear in the forest than a man they didn't know. the hypothetical has sparked a broader discussion about why women fear men..

If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man? Answers to that hypothetical question have sparked a debate about why the vast majority say they would feel more comfortable choosing a bear.

The topic has been hotly discussed for weeks as men and women chimed in with their thoughts all over social media.

Screenshot HQ , a TikTok account, started the conversation, asking a group of women whether they would rather run into a man they didn't know or a bear in the forest. Out of the seven women interviewed for the piece, only one picked a man.

"Bear. Man is scary," one of the women responds.

A number of women echoed the responses given in the original video, writing in the comments that they, too, would pick a bear over a man. The hypothetical has people split, with some expressing their sadness over the state of the world and others cracking jokes. Some men were flabbergasted.

Here's what we know.

A bear is the safer choice, no doubt about it, many say

There were a lot of responses, more than 65,000, under the original post. Many wrote that they understood why the women would choose a bear.

"No one’s gonna ask me if I led the bear on or give me a pamphlet on bear attack prevention tips," @celestiallystunning wrote.

@Brennduhh wrote: "When I die leave my body in the woods, the wolves will be gentler than any man."

"I know a bear's intentions," another woman wrote. "I don't know a man's intentions. no matter how nice they are."

Other TikTok users took it one step further, posing the hypothetical question to loved ones. Meredith Steele, who goes by @babiesofsteele , asked her husband last week whether he would rather have their daughter encounter a bear or a man in the woods. Her husband said he "didn't like either option" but said he was leaning toward the bear.

"Maybe it's a friendly bear," he says.

Diana, another TikTok user , asked her sister-in-law what she would choose and was left speechless.

"I asked her the question, you know, just for giggles. She was like, 'You know, I would rather it be a bear because if the bear attacks me, and I make it out of the woods, everybody’s gonna believe me and have sympathy for me," she said. "But if a man attacks me and I make it out, I’m gonna spend my whole life trying to get people to believe me and have sympathy for me.'"

Bear vs. man debate stirs the pot, woman and some men at odds

The hypothetical has caused some tension, with some women arguing that men will never truly understand what it's like to be a woman or the inherent dangers at play.

Social media users answered this question for themselves, producing memes, spoken word poetry and skits in the days and weeks since.

So, what would you choose?