Autism and Lycanthropy

Bettelheim, a researcher at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a laboratory school of the University of Chicago, made a case that the so-called "feral children," human infants allegedly raised by wolves, exhibit the same characteristics as autistic children who come not from the wild, but ordinary, middle-class American homes.

Yet the actions of those suffering from this heartrending condition so closely resemble those of animals that many observers could only explain their behavior by inferring a life in the wild. Such speculations, Bettelheim observes, perhaps originate in the narcissistic unwillingness of humans to admit that these animal-like creatures could have had pasts at all similar to their own.

Severely autistic children are extremely shy and withdrawn from their surroundings; some react with panic to the slightest visible external motion. They prefer to crawl on all fours for some time, urinating and defecating as they walk or run about, and many do not tolerate clothing and run around naked. Often ferocious, these patients may howl and scream, eat only raw food, bare their canines when annoyed or angered, and attack with their claws and teeth. Bettelheim adds, "there are...more specific reasons to suggest comparing these children with animals. During one year a single staff member had to have medical help more than a dozen times for bites she suffered from [one of the children].... Different, and again reminiscent of animals, is their prowling around at night, in marked contrast to their quiet withdrawal into a corner during the day.... Some will go to almost any length to get raw onions and lettuce and similar food, and go into violent temper tantrums if they do not get them immediately. Others lick salt for hours, but only from their own hands. Others, again, build themselves dens in the dark corners or closets, sleep nowhere else, and prefer spending all day and all night there. Some build caves out of blankets, mattresses, or other suitable ojects. The do not permit us to touch either them or their abodes, and at least two of them would eat only if they could carry their food into their self-created caves or dens, where they would then eat without utensils. Bettelheim argues that one need not suppose that such children were raised by wolves or other creatures in order to account for their pathological behavior. Yet such presumptions are often made, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this condition could easily have been misconstrued as lycanthropy. While embellishments by demonologists preclude diagnosis in most recorded incidents, the case of Jean Grenier, the young boy sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery, is an example that comes to mind (Sidky 239, 241).

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Autism and Lycanthropy copyrighted 1998 to Shantell Powell.