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Secret of the Wild Child - Contenido educativo

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Subido el 7 de septiembre de 2026 por Alberto C.

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Tonight on NOVA, the shocking story of a girl who spent her childhood locked in a bedroom. 00:00:00
The girl reportedly was still wearing diapers when a social worker discovered the case two weeks ago. 00:00:07
Raised in isolation, Jeannie was a wild child, uncivilized, barely able to walk or talk. 00:00:12
The indications are that she was beaten for making noise. 00:00:18
With footage never before seen on television, NOVA follows the controversial efforts to unlock the secret of the wild child. 00:00:22
once in a great while civilized society comes across a wild child a child who 00:00:29
has grown up in severe isolation with virtually no human contact this is the 00:00:53
story of such a case the story begins in Los Angeles on November 4th 1970 00:00:59
officials in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia have taken custody of a 00:01:08
thirteen-year-old girl and they say was kept in such isolation by her parents 00:01:12
that she never even learned to talk. 00:01:17
Her elderly parents have been charged with child abuse. 00:01:20
This is the scene of the crime. 00:01:23
A child was locked in a room 00:01:26
and tied to a potty chair for most of her life. 00:01:27
Completely restrained, she was forced to sit alone 00:01:33
day after day and often through the night. 00:01:36
She had little to look at and no one to talk to 00:01:39
for more than ten years. 00:01:42
The girl reportedly was uttering infantile noises 00:01:46
and still wearing diapers when a social worker discovered the case two weeks ago. 00:01:49
But the authorities are hoping she still may have a normal learning capacity. 00:01:53
Here was a 13-year-old who seemed like an infant, 00:01:57
a girl who would be known as Jeannie. 00:02:01
Jeannie was taken to Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, 00:02:04
where she immediately won the hearts of doctors and scientists. 00:02:14
She was fragile and beautiful, almost haunting. 00:02:19
And so I was pulled, I was very drawn to her, even though I was nervous and had no idea, in many respects, what to expect. 00:02:24
Jeanne was about to test an idea important to science and society, 00:02:34
that a nurturing environment could make up for even the most nightmarish of pasts. 00:02:39
If you make up a sentence in your head, or you write it down, and it has, say, 10, 12 words in it, 00:02:54
And chances are, you can listen for the rest of your life for someone else to say the sentence. 00:03:00
You can go to the library. 00:03:07
Here at UCLA, Susan Curtis teaches students about a crucial human trait, the ability to learn language. 00:03:08
And chances are, you will never come across that sentence. 00:03:16
The students begin their study through a famous case. 00:03:20
The case name is Jeannie. 00:03:23
This is not the person's real name. 00:03:27
But when we think about what a genie is, a genie is a creature that comes out of a bottle or whatever, but emerges into human society, past childhood, and we assume that it really isn't a creature that had a human childhood. 00:03:29
Susan Curtis has a special connection to the story she's telling. 00:03:44
Twenty years ago, she was asked to join a team working to rehabilitate genie. 00:03:49
I was literally at the right place at the right time. I was a new graduate student interested in language acquisition. 00:03:53
unencumbered by family ties or responsibilities, 00:03:59
and they asked me if I would be interested. 00:04:04
When Curtis first joined the case, 00:04:07
Jeannie had a strange bunny walk 00:04:11
and other almost inhuman characteristics. 00:04:13
Jeannie constantly spat. 00:04:17
She sniffed and clawed. 00:04:20
She barely spoke or made any noises. 00:04:22
The indications are that she was beaten for making noise, 00:04:26
and consequently had learned basically not to vocalize, 00:04:30
and she really didn't vocalize very much at all. 00:04:34
When I first met her, she was silent most of the time. 00:04:37
Jeannie also received daily visits at Children's Hospital 00:04:43
from James Kent, her psychologist. 00:04:47
Kent recalls first meeting his new patient. 00:04:51
I was captivated by her. 00:04:55
i was not the last person to become captivated by her 00:04:57
the story as we began to to learn about it was sort of one of the things of course would reach 00:05:01
out and grab you anyway but she had a personal quality that seemed to elicit rescue fantasies 00:05:08
and this in a group of people who were interested in taking care of kids and 00:05:16
who specialized in early childhood who were going to be sort of powered by rescue fantasies anyway 00:05:21
she's reached out and grabbed lots of us one of genie's most captivating qualities was the intense 00:05:26
way she explored her new environment oddly even strangers who knew nothing about her story 00:05:33
seemed to sense her need to do so one particularly striking memory of those early months was an 00:05:39
absolutely wonderful man who was a butcher and he never asked her name he never asked anything 00:05:45
about her they just connected and communicated somehow and every time we came in and i know 00:05:51
this was so with others as well he would slide open the little window and hand her something 00:05:57
that wasn't wrapped a bone of some sort some meat fish whatever and he would allow her to do her 00:06:03
thing with it and to do her thing what her thing was basically was to explore it tactilely to put 00:06:09
it up against her lips and feel it with her lips and touch it almost as if she were blind 00:06:15
word of the wild child spread attracting scientists from all around the country 00:06:20
one of them was oklahoma psychiatrist jay shirley when introduced i extended my hand 00:06:26
she reached out with her fingers and delicately touched my hand and then in a sense that was it 00:06:34
She had made my acquaintance. 00:06:44
She was satisfied for herself about me. 00:06:47
But my reaction was I had a thousand questions immediately. 00:06:51
Who, what, how? 00:06:55
How does this come about? 00:06:57
Why do I see what I'm seeing? 00:06:58
Shirley was an expert in social isolation. 00:07:02
Jeannie was the most extreme case he'd ever seen. 00:07:07
solitary confinement is diabolically the most severe punishment and in my experience really 00:07:09
quite dramatic symptoms develop in as little as 15 minutes to an hour and certainly inside of two 00:07:20
or three days and try to expand this to 10 years boggles one's mind shirley wanted to assess how 00:07:29
well Jeannie had survived her long years of isolation. He directed the team to gather 00:07:38
information on her brain waves. For four nights running, they wired Jeannie to instruments 00:07:43
that measured the electrical activity in her brain while she slept. What they found was 00:07:49
an unusually high number of so-called sleep spindles, the dense bunching patterns that 00:07:59
look like spindles on a spinning machine. This was an abnormal brainwave pattern. 00:08:05
The sleep studies raised a question that would puzzle the Jeannie team for years. 00:08:13
Was Jeannie brain damaged from her years of abuse, or had she been retarded from birth? 00:08:18
When Jeannie was a baby, her father apparently decided she was retarded. 00:08:25
He insisted on keeping her isolated because of that. 00:08:29
authorities pieced together these few facts in the early weeks genie's strange family circumstances 00:08:32
made it hard to learn more genie's mother weak and nearly blind claimed that she too had been 00:08:40
a victim of her domineering husband genie's father shortly after authorities discovered genie 00:08:48
shot and killed himself the suicide only added to the interest in genie's case she was a prized 00:08:54
patient and in the months to come the number of visiting scientists increased 00:09:04
Jeannie's new celebrity status marked the beginning of a debate that would 00:09:08
intensify over time how should her case be handled James Kent's plan was the 00:09:14
first to be adopted he believed Jeannie could get better if she were allowed to 00:09:23
form relationships and he was encouraged when she started to do so up until one 00:09:27
particular day Jeannie didn't seem to respond in any any special way to my 00:09:34
coming or going at the at the end of our session then one day when I left her 00:09:40
expression changed from happy to sad indicate that there was some some 00:09:45
sadness in the separation for her and it was the first indication that I had that 00:09:53
we were beginning to form this relationship I thought if long she had 00:09:58
the capacity to form attachments, she had the capacity to learn, she had the capacity 00:10:02
to get better. 00:10:05
By the end of May, something had happened to add to the hopes for Jeannie's future. 00:10:09
It was a breakthrough that everyone had waited for. 00:10:13
It was captured on videotape by Jeanne Butler, Jeannie's special education teacher. 00:10:19
Here in a classroom at Children's Hospital, Butler is teaching Jeannie to tie her own 00:10:24
shoes. 00:10:29
is about to tell Jeannie, you do it, and we can tell Dr. Kent what you can do. Listen 00:10:30
to Jeannie's reaction. Jeannie said the word doctor. It was one of more than a hundred 00:10:36
words she knew by that spring. Listen to another. She was difficult to understand, but Jeannie 00:10:54
was repeating words genie was beginning to talk i could tell as all of us could just looking at her 00:11:02
that there was a lot to genie and that what we had to do was to make sure we gave her opportunities 00:11:10
to express find a way to take what was latent and express it or somehow then you know acquire it 00:11:18
because the potential just seemed so great 00:11:25
for the first time in her life genie seemed to be thriving 00:11:27
her mental and physical growth since coming to children's hospital was obvious 00:11:36
genie's progress gave birth to a daring hope she might fully recover and science might learn how 00:11:41
her doctors even publicly predicted success their confidence was an eerie echo of a moment 00:11:50
from the past, an echo of another case, like Jeanne's, that preceded hers by nearly 200 00:11:58
years. 00:12:04
The case began in 1800, when citizens of this region in southern France discovered a remarkable 00:12:06
creature who had crept out of the nearby forest. 00:12:15
He was animal in behavior, human in form, mute and naked. 00:12:19
He was a wild child. 00:12:25
He would be known as Victor, 00:12:27
and this statue would be erected to mark his entry into civilization. 00:12:29
Citizens in the village where Victor was discovered guessed he was 12 years old. 00:12:34
His food preferences, his lack of speech, 00:12:39
and the scars on his body indicated he had been in the wild for most of his life. 00:12:42
Victor's story intrigued historian and psychologist Harlan Lane. 00:12:50
around the time doctors in los angeles were following genie's case lane was in france 00:12:54
tracking victor's story shortly after the boy was captured a biology professor took a very careful 00:13:01
look at him name of bonitaire bonitaire tells a story of tremendous indifference to cold that 00:13:08
victor had one day he took him and took off all his clothes and the boy was thrilled to have his 00:13:14
clothes taken off and he started leading him into the outdoors and it was surrounded by snow at that 00:13:19
time and victor far from protesting was filled with joy he gave out cries of joy and uh pulled 00:13:25
bonitaire out the doors and wanted to get out into the snow on other occasions he was actually out in 00:13:31
the snow bare naked leaping about throwing the snow in the air eating snow bonitaire concludes 00:13:37
and I think we have to conclude that our sensitivity to temperature 00:13:43
is very much influenced by our life experiences. 00:13:47
Word of the wild child traveled north to Paris, 00:13:52
where the first anthropological society had just formed. 00:13:55
It was the end of the Age of Enlightenment, 00:13:59
a time of enormous discovery and debate. 00:14:02
Victor walked into the middle of a raging debate. 00:14:06
His timing was incredible. 00:14:08
The question was, what makes us human? 00:14:10
What separates man from the beasts? 00:14:13
Is it human appearance? 00:14:16
Well, anthropological expeditions were returning with a wide variety of races, 00:14:19
and Parisians were not so clear on human appearance. 00:14:24
Is it walking upright? 00:14:29
But orangutans walked upright. 00:14:31
Is it language? 00:14:34
First reports were that Victor had no language. 00:14:36
Then again, perhaps he could learn some. 00:14:39
In any case, philosophers, anatomists, and their ilk 00:14:43
were convinced that careful study of Victor 00:14:46
could finally answer the question, 00:14:48
what is it that makes us human? 00:14:51
With Victor, Parisians had a chance to see human nature 00:14:54
stripped of society and culture. 00:14:57
This was a situation no one would set out to create on purpose. 00:15:00
It was therefore referred to as the forbidden experiment. 00:15:04
Scientists in Paris quickly summoned Victor from the south of France 00:15:07
Although Victor could hear, they brought him to this school 00:15:15
The National Institute for the Deaf 00:15:18
Okay, we're at the National Institute for the Deaf 00:15:21
And it happened right here 00:15:24
The gardener from Rodez brings the wild boy right through here 00:15:25
Into the courtyard 00:15:29
And I guess they were expected 00:15:30
And the director, the Abbe Sikar, comes out 00:15:34
And, come on, they would meet about here. 00:15:37
Sika comes out, and what does he see? 00:15:42
Not a nice little bourgeois deaf kid in the school uniform, his new pupil, 00:15:45
but a raging, spitting, snarling, filthy savage, 00:15:50
defecating where he is, urinating where he is, 00:15:56
biting, covered with scars, 00:15:59
long hair, wadded, yellow teeth, long fingernails, 00:16:01
a savage. Sicard never seen anything like that in his life. So he backs off. What's he going to do? 00:16:05
Idea. He's just hired a young physician from the military hospital up the street, 00:16:11
followed by the name of Jean-Marc Itard. So he calls, Itard, Itard. Jean-Marc Itard was a 26-year-old 00:16:17
medical student who was ready to make his mark. He saw the wild boy as an opportunity. Well, 00:16:24
Tard was an interesting man, wasn't he? How is he going to make a name for himself, a place for 00:16:31
himself in medicine and in the intellectual excitement of the time? Because he was a 00:16:36
brilliant fellow and he read philosophy astutely, studied medicine. Well, the answer was that here 00:16:41
was a chance that would make or break him. If he could actually civilize a wild child, the first 00:16:48
person in history to do so. Why? He would be a figure down through history. Even in the 20th 00:16:54
century, people might be discussing him. Itard's ambitions would pay off. Not only would people in 00:17:01
the 20th century still be discussing him, but the famous French director Francois Truffaut 00:17:07
would play Itard in a movie about the case. The movie illustrates the risk Itard took. 00:17:12
More experienced doctors concluded 00:17:21
Victor was profoundly retarded from birth 00:17:22
and unable to learn. 00:17:25
Itard, though, believed that Victor had become retarded 00:17:30
because of his years of living in the wild. 00:17:33
He believed he could civilize Victor. 00:17:36
Itard's diary of his work with Victor 00:17:43
makes this one of the most documented cases 00:17:45
of wild children throughout history. 00:17:47
In fact, the diary served as the basis 00:17:50
for Truffaut's movie called The Wild Child. 00:17:52
In Los Angeles, Truffaut's movie premiered at the Los Feliz Theater in Hollywood. 00:17:56
One of the strangest chapters of this story is the timing of the premiere. 00:18:10
For Truffaut's movie about history's most famous wild child 00:18:17
opened exactly one week after Genie was discovered. 00:18:20
In true Hollywood fashion, the Genie team took advantage of this coincidence. 00:18:25
They arranged their own private screening. 00:18:30
In charge of this event was hospital chief of psychiatry, Howard Hansen. 00:18:37
Well, that afternoon at 4.30, we left Children's Hospital and we paraded up the street. 00:18:42
We had an entourage up the street to the Las Feliz Theater. 00:18:51
It was awe-inspiring to us because here was the first case that had been documented in any scientific way. 00:18:56
and here we were having an opportunity to see a film portrayal of that here was history's stamp 00:19:04
of approval for daring to rehabilitate a wild child guitar inspired everyone at the screening 00:19:11
in other words everybody was shocked and stunned they just sat in silence for a bit because 00:19:18
the film was so powerful in itself. 00:19:41
And then the analogy with Genie began to hit. 00:19:44
It was like here history was repeating itself, 00:19:51
and everybody there thought, 00:19:55
here is an opportunity to learn something. 00:19:57
The screening was part of a special conference 00:20:01
for which the Genie team invited consultants 00:20:04
from all over the country. 00:20:06
a government agency the national institute of mental health had agreed to fund a scientific 00:20:08
project on genie now it was time to focus the direction of research it soon became clear though 00:20:14
that participants were unlikely to agree on one course of action oh we were off in a million 00:20:21
directions i mean each expert each person in their own discipline thought oh wow i can do this i can 00:20:27
do this, I can do that. We were flooded, flooded with our own associations and with the pursuits 00:20:34
that each of us might have thought, wow, look what we can do, look what we might learn from this, 00:20:41
a girl who has appeared out of nowhere. To bring all the proposed plans for Jeannie into focus, 00:20:47
there was another player on the team, David Riggler, a psychologist at Children's Hospital. 00:20:56
Riggler, too, was hooked on Jeannie's case. 00:21:02
I think everybody who came in contact with her was attracted to her. 00:21:05
She had a quality of somehow connecting with people, 00:21:08
which developed more and more, but was present really from the start. 00:21:11
She had a way of reaching out without saying anything, 00:21:16
but just somehow by the kind of look in her eyes, 00:21:19
and people wanted to do things for her. 00:21:22
Riggler decided how to focus the research 00:21:28
around the time of Genie's first birthday at Children's Hospital. 00:21:30
Genie was now 14 years old. 00:21:34
The timing was fitting, because Riddler wanted to know, 00:21:36
could the clock be turned back for Genie? 00:21:40
In particular, could a teenager still learn to talk? 00:21:42
This had already been the subject of much debate 00:21:47
by the time Genie was discovered. 00:21:49
It all began with Noam Chomsky, 00:21:53
a young linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 00:21:55
Chomsky declared that we acquire language 00:22:00
not just because we are taught it, 00:22:02
but because we are born with the principles of language. 00:22:04
They're in our genes. 00:22:07
We have language, Chomsky said, because of nature, 00:22:09
not just nurture. 00:22:12
Then along came a neuropsychologist 00:22:15
to add his own twist to the theory. 00:22:17
Eric Linenberg agreed we're born with the principles of language, 00:22:19
but claimed there is a deadline for applying them. 00:22:22
If a first language isn't acquired by puberty, he said, it may be too late. 00:22:25
Chomsky and Lindenberg rocked the field. 00:22:32
They were hot. 00:22:35
Linguistics was in. 00:22:37
It was a perfect time to test the new ideas, recalls linguist Alyssa Newport. 00:22:39
What Lindenberg proposed is what's called the critical period hypothesis. 00:22:45
And what he suggested is that there's a particular period in the life of humans 00:22:49
when they're ripe for learning languages. 00:22:53
What this hypothesis was looking for was some more direct evidence. 00:22:56
But of course you don't do these experiments. 00:23:02
One never wishes to deprive somebody of language 00:23:04
during the critical period to see what happens. 00:23:07
It happened that at that time, 00:23:11
when that would have been the right thing for Lenneberg's hypothesis, 00:23:14
genie was discovered. 00:23:17
Stove! Stove! 00:23:18
this is why Susan Curtis joined the genie team she was a graduate student in 00:23:21
linguistics she would put the critical period hypothesis to its first real test 00:23:27
this is one of the first videotapes of Curtis's work with genie she wanted it 00:23:36
It seemed to me almost desperately to recode her world with verbal labels. 00:23:48
And sometimes we would just stand at a window 00:23:52
and she would take my hand and point out the window at a panorama before us 00:23:55
and I wouldn't really know exactly what it was she wanted to know the word for, 00:23:59
but she would persist until she at least got a new word. 00:24:02
While Curtis tracked Jeannie's speech, 00:24:06
James Kent continued work on her emotional development. 00:24:09
Kent was concerned that with the growing number of people involved in her case Jeannie wouldn't 00:24:12
be able to form single dependable relationships so he set out to be her surrogate parent wanted 00:24:19
to be part of her sort of ordinary life so I would frequently be there in the morning when 00:24:26
she had breakfast and be there in the evening when she went to bed read her a story kiss her 00:24:30
goodnight turn off the lights go and then do things during the day when she became when she 00:24:34
had sort of the important things that she had to go through like physical 00:24:40
exams or things like that I would come along with her as though she were my 00:24:43
child she was very special to me well doctors aren't supposed to love their 00:24:47
patients but if you could find a word that meant the same thing yes yeah I was 00:24:56
very attached to her first time she saw helium balloon she couldn't believe him 00:25:02
the fact that you could let them go up and pull them back down again she had a kind of laugh that 00:25:26
some people have and it's just a full-out chuckle it's so contagious everybody around them starts 00:25:32
to laugh well they made her laugh like that one of my memories was that we would go to a place 00:25:36
say Woolworth's where there would be a stand of spools of thread and spools where each color 00:25:46
thread would incrementally change from the spools next to it and she wanted a 00:25:54
word for every different hue and I didn't know I mean I had a box of 64 00:26:00
Crayola crayons as a child and I remembered you know burnt sienna and all 00:26:06
these colors that I tried to extract from my memory but I don't English 00:26:10
doesn't have words for all of these different shoes and she was very 00:26:14
frustrated when I would say very dark blue and very very dark blue for Jeannie 00:26:17
every new object every field trip was a visit to a magic kingdom the previous 00:26:24
fall the world had discovered genie now genie could discover the world there was 00:26:32
a time that she passed a father and a little boy who were coming out of a shop 00:27:03
and the little boy was carrying a toy fire engine and they just passed and 00:27:09
then they turned around and came back and the boy without a word handed the 00:27:14
fire engine to Jeannie. She never asked for it. She never said a word. She did this kind of thing 00:27:19
somehow to people. Could I imagine what that was like? Could I see things with her eyes? I don't 00:27:24
believe so. I don't believe I really could. Sometimes I could understand and guess pretty 00:27:40
well what she was going to do, but that was familiarity and not an ability, I think, to 00:27:45
empathize with, understand the way she saw the world. The summer after her discovery was a time 00:27:50
firsts for Jeannie. The most significant happened here in the home of Jeanne 00:28:07
Butler, her teacher at Children's Hospital. Jeannie moved in. It was a new 00:28:15
step for Jeannie, her first trial run in a foster home. 00:28:25
milk into the bedroom here butler videotapes genie's passion for hoarding things especially 00:28:37
containers of liquid although there is no obvious explanation this has been reported in other cases 00:28:43
of children raised in isolation genie began living here after butler said she had exposed 00:28:49
genie to german measles it began as a temporary quarantine butler wanted to make it permanent 00:28:58
butler shown here with genie and james kent wanted to be genie's official foster parent 00:29:05
and she wanted to see changes in the handling of genie's case butler thought frequent visits 00:29:16
by team members kent and susan curtis were exhausting genie that was the summer when we 00:29:22
were then both disallowed into gene butler's house so um you know we didn't we didn't have 00:29:27
such a fun summer it was a summer that included weeks of of uh concern and anxiety and you know 00:29:33
anger and all kinds of things because he and i were kicked out of jane's house why she was crazy 00:29:39
and she didn't want the other attachments i mean she wanted she i mean she used to walk around 00:29:46
saying i'm going i am going to be the next annie sullivan this girl is going to make me famous 00:29:51
and we used to sort of joke about it because she was so overt about it and we thought why doesn't 00:29:57
you know even if she has the desire why is she so willing to tell the rest of us but she certainly 00:30:02
found a way to concoct, and she concocted 00:30:06
this story. The whole thing is untrue. 00:30:09
She didn't have German measles. She had a rash. 00:30:10
The bickering continued for more than 00:30:14
a month, according to journals 00:30:16
left behind by Jean Butler, who died 00:30:18
in 1988. 00:30:20
Butler wrote she 00:30:23
feared Jeannie was being experimented 00:30:24
with too much. 00:30:26
Are you going to do that again? 00:30:27
Whether this was 00:30:30
Butler's true motivation in keeping 00:30:31
away other team members cannot be known. 00:30:33
but it raised again the issue of how Jeannie should be treated. 00:30:35
Could she be a scientific subject and still be a patient? 00:30:40
On the morning of August 13th, social workers arrived at Butler's house 00:30:45
with a decision on her application to be Jeannie's foster parent. 00:30:49
Partly on advice from Children's Hospital, it was rejected. 00:30:54
We were not satisfied with the quality of the care 00:31:00
that Jeannie had at Jean Butler's. 00:31:03
So that had to be interrupted. 00:31:07
And, again, it was up to management, i.e. us, to interrupt that. 00:31:10
Jeannie returned to Children's Hospital for only a couple of hours. 00:31:18
A new foster parent came to take her home. 00:31:22
It was David Riggler. 00:31:26
Riggler decided to take charge of the case. 00:31:28
He decided to take over Kent's role as therapist 00:31:32
and also be Jeannie's foster parent and the principal investigator. 00:31:34
Ordinarily, mental health people 00:31:40
are not involved in these kinds of multiple roles, 00:31:42
but I have to stress how desperate we were 00:31:46
to find a place that was appropriate. 00:31:48
And I remember making the commitment in my mind 00:31:51
for a three-month period, 00:31:53
which obviously got extended much longer. 00:31:55
How long was she with you? 00:31:58
She was with us approximately four years. 00:31:59
Jeannie's new home was in a neighborhood near Children's Hospital. 00:32:04
She lived here with David Riggler, his wife Marilyn, and the Riggler children. 00:32:08
We really didn't know what to expect, except that we knew that Jeannie needed a great deal of help. 00:32:12
And on the other hand, it was very exciting to feel that perhaps we could help her, 00:32:18
and perhaps she could be rehabilitated. 00:32:26
Marilyn, a graduate student in human development, was Jeannie's new teacher. 00:32:29
she soon found herself giving jeannie unconventional lessons 00:32:34
jeannie would erupt in silent storms of rage tugging and tearing her own body 00:32:39
to turn jeannie's self-destructive anger outward marilyn taught her how to have a fit 00:32:44
how to slam doors and stamp her feet eventually marilyn encouraged jeannie to turn her pain and 00:32:49
anger into words and there came a time when she could say rough time and sometimes she could tell 00:32:58
you the degree of how upset she was by waving one finger, which meant she was very upset, 00:33:05
or kind of waving her hand, which meant she was upset, but it wasn't going to be a big 00:33:13
deal. 00:33:19
One of Marilyn's first tasks was to awaken in Jeannie a sense of her connection to the 00:33:20
physical world like her historic counterpart Victor Jeannie seemed 00:33:35
disconnected from certain bodily sensations I would allow her to run her 00:33:44
own bath water or her own shower water and when I would touch it I would 00:33:50
realize it was icy cold and I would say oh this is so cold you're gonna freeze 00:33:56
and it was as though it didn't make any difference in their new role as Jeannie's 00:34:03
foster parents the Riddler's were suddenly responsible for a child who 00:34:09
needed full-time supervision they also took responsibility for Jeannie's 00:34:13
therapy attempts to help her grapple with the horror of her childhood in this 00:34:21
primitive role-playing exercise, Marilyn pretends to be Jeannie's mother. 00:34:28
Hurry up! Hurry up, because there isn't any time. Father's gonna be angry. 00:34:33
Marilyn tries to elicit memories of Jeannie's past. 00:34:40
I wonder what you're thinking. 00:34:44
Do I die a father? Do I die a father? 00:34:47
You want to see your father? Father is not living. 00:34:59
Do you remember what it was like when you lived at home? 00:35:03
What were you sitting on when you ate the cereal? 00:35:10
In the potty chair. 00:35:14
Where did you stay when you lived at home? 00:35:22
Where did you live? 00:35:26
Where did you sleep? 00:35:27
While this videotape shows how distressed Jeannie was by her childhood, 00:35:28
it also reveals a developmental breakthrough. 00:35:42
Jeannie was using language to describe past events. 00:35:45
Jeannie was talking about things that happened 00:35:51
before words were a part of her world. 00:35:54
For a child who barely spoke just a short time ago, 00:35:58
Jeannie was doing remarkably well with language. 00:36:01
Susan Curtis continued to track her progress. 00:36:04
Jeannie could read simple words. 00:36:09
Her vocabulary was growing. 00:36:15
Here she is about to say, I like log. 00:36:17
I like log. 00:36:21
Let me see. The log? 00:36:23
I like log. 00:36:24
You found a picture of a log. I didn't even know you knew what a log was. 00:36:26
Where do you see a log? 00:36:30
I was struck with how different the words that she knew were from the vocabulary words that young children would know when they're acquiring a first language. 00:36:32
She had words for emotions, angry, sad, excited, happy. 00:36:42
She had words, color words, shape words, square, rectangle. 00:36:49
I like shook. 00:36:54
He likes your words. 00:36:56
I shook. 00:36:57
Jeannie seemed to be pulling off a linguistics coup. 00:36:58
She had passed the critical age of puberty, 00:37:02
but she seemed to be learning a first language. 00:37:04
Curtis began doubting the notion 00:37:07
that there was a deadline for doing so. 00:37:09
My early ideas were that the sky might be the limit. 00:37:12
I couldn't help thinking that she might in fact 00:37:18
just be able to show that people really were wrong. 00:37:22
Janie was at last settled into her new life. 00:37:28
She even went to a nursery school. 00:37:30
Hopes grew that unlike other cases of children isolated from society, 00:37:36
genies could have a happy ending. 00:37:40
At the Paris Institute for the Deaf, 00:37:46
genies' historic counterpart also seemed to flourish 00:37:48
when reunited with civilization. 00:37:51
As shown in Truffaut's movie, 00:37:56
Victor responded successfully to methods used to teach the deaf. 00:37:58
Victor's teacher created his own methods as well. 00:38:02
Itar used cut-out letters for lessons that are still used in kindergartens all over the world. 00:38:06
He had a knack for gradually increasing the complexity of Victor's tasks. 00:38:16
tasks. 00:38:20
Victor is teaching Victor to read simple phrases like to throw a key, so he writes throw key 00:38:21
in French and then flings a key, then expects Victor to do the same. 00:38:34
Victor's doing well, he's reading the sentences, performing the actions, but Itar doesn't trust 00:38:39
it, it could be by sheer memory, he's seen Itar do it, so he decides to scramble the 00:38:43
nouns and verbs and get some weird combinations like to tear a stone to cut a cup to eat a broom 00:38:49
presents tear a stone to victor and he shows some ingenuity he goes off he gets a hammer and he 00:38:54
smashes the stone cut a cup picks up the cup and hurls it on the floor and it shatters eat a broom 00:39:01
this time he changes the noun goes off and gets a piece of bread and devours it 00:39:07
This was Etar, constantly analyzing, upping the ante, pushing the kid toward civilization, toward the skills that we have. 00:39:12
And Victor, generally rising to the challenge, each time taking the small step. 00:39:21
This was the kind of struggle they engaged in together for six years. 00:39:27
Indeed, for a while, teacher and pupil were joined in a shared mission of awakening. 00:39:32
and this is as far as film director Truffaut 00:39:38
takes his version of the story 00:39:43
many people have asked me 00:39:45
well what do you think of the Truffaut film 00:39:48
The Wild Child, L'Enfant Sauvage 00:39:50
and what I think of it was 00:39:52
that it was a pretty solid job 00:39:54
of following Tard's reports 00:39:56
but I do have one exception 00:39:58
and that is at the end of the film 00:40:02
the child climbs the stairs 00:40:04
when the idea is that he's walking off 00:40:05
into a future of endless possibilities 00:40:07
in which he may even write his autobiography, 00:40:10
and that's simply false. 00:40:13
In reality, the history books show 00:40:15
that Victor's progress slowed down. 00:40:21
Itard reported, while Victor knew how to read simple words, 00:40:23
he never really learned how to talk. 00:40:27
Itard recommended that the forbidden experiment be stopped. 00:40:29
You know, we attributed to Itard this motive 00:40:34
of wanting to use Victor to build his own career, 00:40:37
and I think that was true. 00:40:40
When the point came that he was no longer serving Victor, 00:40:42
nor serving science, he was no longer serving his career, 00:40:44
he abandoned him, he let him go. 00:40:48
Tarr gave up. 00:40:51
He asked Madame Guérin, the housekeeper, 00:40:52
to take the boy in down the street from the deaf school, 00:40:54
and there they lived, a rather gray, sad, 00:40:57
forlorn existence, the two of them. 00:41:01
So the story is not as romantic as Truffaut would have us believe. 00:41:03
Victor lived his last days at this very spot in Paris. 00:41:10
He died in his 40s in 1828. 00:41:14
Victor's story did not end well. 00:41:22
In Los Angeles, more than a century later, 00:41:25
Jeannie's caregivers were working to ensure that their pupil fared better. 00:41:27
When will you see your mama in the house? 00:41:34
When? 00:41:37
When Jeannie used gestures a lot to communicate, 00:41:37
the Rigglers arranged for her to learn sign language. 00:41:41
I will see Mama Saturday night. 00:41:44
Critics fault the teacher in Victor's case for emphasizing spoken speech. 00:41:52
The Rigglers tried to avoid this mistake. 00:41:57
And we're all finished. 00:41:59
The weeks turned into months, the months into years, 00:42:02
and David Riggler, the man who would be scientist, therapist, 00:42:06
and foster parent to Jeannie 00:42:09
seemed to find a way to juggle all those roles. 00:42:11
In reality, the juggling act had started to fall apart. 00:42:14
This is the paper that's unfolded. 00:42:18
For years, Riggler had trouble 00:42:20
managing the research part of the case. 00:42:22
Curtis's language studies proceeded, 00:42:25
but Riggler had been getting government money to do more. 00:42:27
Indeed, he gathered hundreds of videos, 00:42:31
he supervised countless tests, 00:42:34
but he never clearly defined his own research. 00:42:35
Show me the shoe that's untied. 00:42:39
Untied. 00:42:43
To add to the murkiness of the study was an unresolved question 00:42:44
which would make it difficult to draw firm scientific conclusions. 00:42:49
Was Jeannie brain damaged from birth? 00:42:53
Team members disagreed. 00:42:56
My impression was clearly that Jeannie was mentally retarded from birth 00:42:58
based on, for example, my sleep study, 00:43:03
which showed these extreme spindles, 00:43:08
which are fairly characteristic 00:43:11
of severe mental retardation. 00:43:12
Jeannie, although functionally retarded 00:43:16
because she had hardly lived 00:43:18
and experienced the world around her, 00:43:20
was not mentally deficient in any sense 00:43:22
in which we typically think of as mentally deficient. 00:43:25
For example, on psychological tests that measure mental age, 00:43:28
every year after she had been found, 00:43:32
her mental age increased one year. 00:43:35
This is just not something that happens in a person with a child or an adult who's mentally retarded. 00:43:37
The government agency that was funding the research project grew uneasy with the scientific ambiguities of Jeannie's case. 00:43:46
The National Institute of Mental Health was looking for payback for the years of money it poured into the study, and it wasn't finding any. 00:43:59
After repeated warnings in the fall of 74, NIMH stopped funding the Genie project, citing a failure to collect data in a scientifically meaningful way. 00:44:06
Nobody knew exactly how to deal with this. We were doing our best. We got the best kind of counsel, the best kind of advice. 00:44:18
we had to sort that out and take that as it came but we did the very best we 00:44:28
knew how and we believe that nobody knew any better in the year following the 00:44:33
loss of their research grant the Riggler's decided to end their foster 00:44:41
care of Jeannie their decision caused concern among their colleagues it's not 00:44:46
that it came as a surprise to us or shouldn't have we had a lot of 00:44:55
consultants and a lot of people coming in and one of the questions we were 00:44:59
asked often by more than one person is what's going to happen here when the 00:45:02
hospital goes away when you know if the research grant goes away if all of the 00:45:08
sort of interest in how this youngster is developing when the researchers fold 00:45:12
their tents and go away who's gonna stay behind the genie this was something that 00:45:15
I was certainly concerned about the fact that should we not take genie because we 00:45:21
did not plan to have her forever and it was something that we we talked about 00:45:28
very actively and we finally decided that if we could give her a good home 00:45:35
with much love and rehabilitation within that home nurturing caretaking and good 00:45:42
things that that would give her the ability to cope at some later time so 00:45:51
that she would have a good foundation and a stable home and that was our 00:46:02
reasoning for linguist Susan Curtis it was time to sum up her years of work 00:46:07
with Jeannie a clear picture was emerging in her data but for Jeannie that 00:46:15
That picture was not promising. 00:46:21
Here when asked to make a question, Jeannie comes up with, what red-blue is in? 00:46:24
Jeannie didn't seem to be able to put words together in a normal grammatical way. 00:46:35
This seemed to support the idea of a critical period for acquiring language. 00:46:41
In Jeannie's case, the vocabulary was what she was good at. 00:46:45
Conveying messages is what she was good at. 00:46:49
But if you look at a sentence that she would utter, it wouldn't be grammatical. 00:46:52
So she might say things like, spot, chew, glove, applesauce, buy, store, 00:46:57
where the message was clear. 00:47:02
You know, the dog named Spot chewed the glove. 00:47:04
Or we need applesauce, we need to buy applesauce at the store. 00:47:08
But in both of these cases, you can see they're not sentences of English. 00:47:12
We wouldn't say, applesauce by store. 00:47:15
We would say, we need to buy applesauce at the store, 00:47:17
or applesauce is what we want from the store, 00:47:20
or something that is an actual sentence of English. 00:47:22
Much of the language research on Jeannie was completed by 1975, 00:47:26
a pivotal year for her. 00:47:31
That summer, she returned here to her childhood home 00:47:33
to live with her mother. 00:47:36
Jeannie's mother had been acquitted of child abuse charges 00:47:37
She wanted to resume care of her daughter 00:47:44
But she soon found it too difficult 00:47:46
Thus began another sad chapter in Jeannie's life 00:47:50
A series of placements in foster homes 00:47:56
Jeannie was subjected to abuse 00:47:59
To punishment 00:48:03
To harassment 00:48:05
To the extreme in some of these homes 00:48:07
Then she would be moved again to another home, and another home. 00:48:11
And meanwhile, we knew nothing about it until the bombshell hit. 00:48:16
The bombshell. 00:48:21
A lawsuit. 00:48:23
A lawsuit against Hansen, Riggler, Kent, Curtis, and Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. 00:48:25
Like Victor's, Jeannie's case had not ended well. 00:48:35
and now there was a modern American twist to her story a lawsuit the lawsuit 00:48:39
filed by Jeannie's mother charged the Jeannie team with excessive and 00:48:47
outrageous testing the lawsuit claimed the researchers gave testing priority 00:48:51
over Jeannie's welfare pushing her beyond the limits of her endurance look 00:49:03
carefully. It's dark, yes. Come on. Which box does that belong in? No. The lawyers suing 00:49:08
Children's Hospital were Louise Monaco and Samuel Paz. They should have had clues that 00:49:21
they were going at things wrongly because they were getting visits from NIMH, the National 00:49:27
Institute of Mental Health, telling them, well, gee, yeah, you got all these videos, 00:49:32
but they're not indexed, they're not catalogued, 00:49:36
they're all thrown in a drawer. 00:49:38
You're doing tests that have no scientific purpose. 00:49:41
You're doing tests that you made up. 00:49:44
And they were doing tests repetitively, 00:49:45
which lose their validity with the repetitiveness. 00:49:47
Yeah, I mean, there are certain tests, 00:49:50
if you administer them within a year, 00:49:51
you can't tell whether you're measuring anything or not. 00:49:53
You're just measuring how familiar the subject is with the test. 00:49:55
Okay, I'll try it again. 00:50:00
Here, you do it. 00:50:02
Put them in the box. I want you to work fast. 00:50:03
Come on, let's work fast. 00:50:05
it was our job to measure her progress to determine what changes were taking place indeed 00:50:06
if we had not done as much as we did we would have really not fulfilled the purposes of our grant but 00:50:13
in addition to that the testing that she underwent was by and large fun experiences for her 00:50:20
depositions were taken experts were summoned while the suit was eventually settled it raised 00:50:28
an important question did the team go as far as it could go in treating Jeannie or did the 00:50:36
research get in the way we did everything we could not to exploit the case in a way that 00:50:43
would impinge on her privacy or impact on her psychologically or emotionally. 00:50:52
And that wasn't difficult because of the feelings we had for her. 00:50:59
I don't think they started out with the notion of let's exploit her for all the money we 00:51:03
can get. 00:51:07
I think maybe everybody started out with the notion, one, they wanted to help her, but 00:51:10
two, this was like the biggest thing that had hit town in quite a number of years. 00:51:14
It was right on the heels of Truffaut's movie, 00:51:19
The Wild Child, hence the name that was given to her. 00:51:21
I mean, when they had seminars at Children's Hospital, 00:51:24
they showed the movie as part of the seminar. 00:51:27
And so, I mean, this was like a worldwide attraction, 00:51:32
so I think it was really easy to get sidetracked. 00:51:34
Despite all she'd been through, Jeannie's troubles were not over. 00:51:40
In her first foster home, Jeannie was severely punished for vomiting. 00:51:44
The experience was so traumatizing, 00:51:50
Jeannie ended up back in Children's Hospital 00:51:53
where the Rigglers offered assistance. 00:51:55
You couldn't help it. 00:51:58
So now you're keeping your mouth closed so you won't vomit. 00:52:02
Jeannie was afraid to open her mouth. 00:52:09
She regressed to the only way she knew how to be under siege, 00:52:12
completely silent. 00:52:16
This would be one of the last times the Rigglers videotaped Jeannie. 00:52:24
Jeannie now lives in an adult care foster home in Southern California. 00:53:02
It's at least the sixth home she has lived in since the research project ended. 00:53:06
What do we take away from this really sad story? 00:53:15
Look, there's an ethical dilemma in this kind of research. 00:53:18
If you want to do rigorous science, then Jeannie's interests are going to come second some of the time. 00:53:21
If you only care about helping Jeannie, then you wouldn't do a lot of this scientific research. 00:53:26
So what are you going to do? 00:53:31
To make matters worse, the two roles, scientist and therapist, 00:53:33
were combined in one person in her case. 00:53:37
So I think future generations are going to study Jeanne's case 00:53:39
as we've been studying Victor's, 00:53:42
not only for what it can teach us about human development, 00:53:45
but also for what it can teach us about the rewards 00:53:47
and the risks of conducting the forbidden experiment. 00:53:50
Materias:
Inglés
Niveles educativos:
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Subido por:
Alberto C.
Licencia:
Reconocimiento - No comercial - Compartir igual
Visualizaciones:
2
Fecha:
7 de septiembre de 2026 - 18:37
Visibilidad:
Público
Centro:
IES VELAZQUEZ
Duración:
55′ 01″
Relación de aspecto:
4:3 Hasta 2009 fue el estándar utilizado en la televisión PAL; muchas pantallas de ordenador y televisores usan este estándar, erróneamente llamado cuadrado, cuando en la realidad es rectangular o wide.
Resolución:
636x478 píxeles
Tamaño:
328.84 MBytes

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