Saturday, September 18, 2010

Genie - Feral Child

See a famous essay of Maya Pines entitled "The Civilizing of Genie" about an abused girl who was essentially tied up and deprived of all verbal interaction up until  ~12 years old.

Excerpts:
Unlike normal children, however, Genie never asked questions, despite many efforts to train her to do so... Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. That ability seems to be innate, since babies respond to many more consonants that are used in their parents’ language—English, for example, has only 24 consonant sounds, yet babies of English-speaking parents react to the consonants present in Japanese. Babies lose that ability as they grow up. By the age of six, when children enter school, their ability to hear the difference between sounds to which they have not been exposed in their own language is severely reduced.....Genie, unlike 99 percent of righthanded people, seemed to use the right hemisphere of her brain for language.... extraordinary attention to the visual world....All of her first two-word phrases were about static objects. While normal children usually start talking about people and actions or about the relations between people and objects, Genie spoke primarily about the attributes of things: “black shoe,” “lot bread.”


If I were to give an analysis from my way of thinking I'd lay it down thus:
Given that the act of birth is an introducing of an already extant existential being, and the living of Life being only the process by which that existential being comes to manifest/actualize itself, a feral child having been cut off from living life's processes will consequently be "stuck" in the existential state i.e. things are as they are, visual, static.

Questions are superfluous in such a mindset because there's no need for the process of discovery innate in questioning. 
[Questioning btw being at the very begining of bnei yisrael's birth at Pesach as well] 

Furthermore, the actions that objects perform, to a person with a purely existentialist mindset, will be of lesser significance compared to the existential state of what those objects are i.e. black shoe, lot bread.

I personally would have thought that engaging in a loving sexual relationship would be the best course of rehabilitation for such a child. Namely because sexual intercourse and interaction is the epitome of process as opposed to stasis, Becoming as opposed to Being. My unprofessional abstract philosophical 2 cents, nothing more. Moreover, the essay does in fact mention that Genie masturbated excessively...

No comments: