'La Sociedad de Observadores del Hombre', "La Societé des Observateurs de L'homme", fué fundada en Paris en 1800 por un grupo de naturalistas y médicos dedicados al estudio de la humanidad. A esta Sociedad pertenecía el médico Jean Marc Itard. El fué el encargado de estudiar el caso del Niño Salvaje de Aveyron.
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"Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature",
Lucien Malson.
"Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature",
Lucien Malson.
('The Wild Boy of Aveyron', Jean Itard)
Introduction
"The idea that man has no nature is now beyond dispute. He has or rather is a history. Why this theory should have caused such a scandal when it was advanced by the existentialists a few years ago is still not clear since it is now the explicit assumption of all the main currents of contemporary thought.
Behaviourists deny that 'mental characteristics or intellectual skills and capacities can be inherited'.
Marxism recognizes that man at birth is the least capable of all creatures and this is 'the pre-condition of his further progress'. Psycho-analysis, in the words of Lagache, confirms that 'there is nothing in human beings to suggest the presence of instincts with their own patterns of development'.
That current which combines elements from both Marxism and psycho-analysis (culturalism) dispels any remaining doubts on this issue by revealing just how much the individual owes to the environment in the construction of his personality."
"Children deprived too early of all social contact --those known as feral or 'wolf' children-- become so stunted in their solitude that their behaviour comes to resemble that of the lower animals. Rather than a state of nature in which one can detect a rudimentary homo sapiens or homo faber, one discovers instead a condition of such abnormality that to understand it one needs not psychology, but teratology."
"It points towards our own conclusion that the search for human nature among 'wild' children has always proved fruitless precisely because human nature can appear only when human existence has entered the social context"
(Porque no es la Naturaleza la que ha hecho al hombre; nos convertimos en humanos --'sapiens'--, no mediante una evolucion natural, sino artificial: el hombre --no como animal, sino como 'sapiens'-se hizo y se manipuló a si mismo hasta alcanzar el estadio humano. Pues de habernos convertidos en 'humanos' a traves de una evolucion natural, las caracteristicas adquiridas mediante este proceso evolutivo deberian de ser innatas y, como consecuencia, aparecer, automaticamente, en los casos de los 'niños salvajes' criados sin contacto humano)
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"Even when isolated from birth, animals retain quite clearly recognizable instincts, whatever other damage they may suffer in the process, and when a domesticated animal returns to the wild its old instincts reassert themselves. Nothing like this, says Levi-Strauss, could happen in the case of human beings because 'the species has no natural behaviour to which an isolated individual might retrogress'. Deprived of the society of others man becomes a monster."
"He cannot regress to his pre-cultural state, because such a state never existed. When children are prematurely deprived of their human surroundings, either by accident or design, or when they are abandoned in the wild and left to survive by their own devices, they do, in fact, develop 'unnaturally' (que es la forma filogenética en la que nuestra parte 'sapiens' --nuestro humano cortex cerebral-- se desarrolló y evoluciono: no-naturalmente). It would be quite absurd to treat them as a 'perfect examples of some early human stages' or as instances of natural and therefore pre-cultural man. These Tarzan-children, as Ruyer ironically calls them, have no resemblance whatsoever to Rousseau's imaginary hero. If any further proof is needed that the term 'human nature' is completely devoid of sense, the following study of wolf children will provide it. The accuracy and authenticity of many of the accounts have admittedly been seriously questioned, and these doubts will be examined later. We will here merely ask a single question - indeed the whole of the previous discussion was leading to this one point: now that it is generally recognized that the dominant, fundamental role in the shaping of man's personality is played by his social environment should one be surprised that a non-human environment produces semi-human children ?"
"Stories of wolf children have been known for a long time, believers in human nature as a serious challenge to their view of man. Their reluctance to draw the obvious consequences from these accounts arose from a reading of the evidence which refused to allow such backwardness any cause other than physical abnormality. To the pre-scientific mind a child who was unable to walk erect or who, once the original opportunity was passed, could only master a language with great difficulty appeared as a biological freak or as a sufferer from some congenital weakness. No one today would suggest that a child prematurely isolated and deprived of adult contact could be expected to walk erect like other children, display the usual talents at writing or arithmetic and behave generally like a well-bred child should. And if the psychological portraits of these wolf children strike sceptics as exaggerated, let them sit down and exercise their literary talents on the imaginary consequences of premature isolation. Itard's question was a challenge to the nineteenth century (un desafio en nuestros dias):
If it was proposed to resolve the following metaphysical problem, viz. 'to determine what would be the degree of understanding, and the nature of the ideas of a youth, who, deprived, from his infancy, of all education, should have lived entirely separated from individuals of his species'...the moral picture of this youth would be that of the Savage of Aveyron... (p. 99 below).
Itard made a meticulous study of this 'savage' from Avevron in two reports which are still the best known and most convincing record of such cases....Itard's insights were in many ways prophetic:
I have not the least doubt, that, if we were to insulate, at the earliest period of infancy, two children ... and were to do the same with two quadrupeds, chosen from the species of brutes, that was the least intelligent, these latter would not shew themselves much superior to the former, in the means of providing for their wants and in taking care ... of their own preservation (p. 138 n. 10 below) "
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El libro de Lucien Malson, y, sobre todo, las observaciones y estudios científicos de Itard sobre el Niño Salvaje de Aveyron, --y todos los demás estudios que se han hecho al respecto-- son axiomáticos sobre el hecho de que el llamado "homo sapiens", como 'homo', como animal, pertenece, lógicamente, a una evolución natural de 3.2 miles de millones de años desde la aparación la vida microscópica en la Tierra, pero en cuanto a su cortex cerebral de 'sapiens' -(el paso, en dos millones de años, de 450 ctm. cúbicos de volumen craneal, a sus 1500 actuales)-, lo que nos dá nuestras caracteristicas humanas, estas facultades y capacidades conformaron una contextura producida por una evolución innatural --no fabricada por la Naturaleza--, es decir: creadas por el hombre al manipularse a sí mismo (¿al comer del fruto prohíbido?) , y ello viene probado en el insoslayable e irrebatible hecho de que, si se hubiesen conseguido tales características humanas mediante una evolución natural --producidas por la Naturaleza--, cualquier infante humano criado sin contacto con sus propios congéneres ya las traería al mundo consigo mismo, como ocurre con todas las especies conocidas en la Tierra...excepto con nuestra propia especie.
El corolario de ello, naturalmente, es superevidente.
Y sobre él está montado el mayor tabú de todos:
el tabú es el hombre mismo.
Ahora ya podemos entender el por qué.
Freud y Reich lo confirman en su hermenéutica antropológica:
"The downfall of Adam and Eva is obviously beyond any doubt due to something they did against the Laws of God --the laws of Nature--....".
Con razón, Erich Fromm define al hombre (en su 'Psicoanalisis de la Sociedad Contemporanea' -'The Sane Society'-) como "una anomalía": la anomalía de una evolución innatural que dejo al hombre afuera de la Naturaleza, aún perteneciendo a ella, contradicción mortal e insoluble entre cuerpo (Naturaleza) y mente (evolucion Innatural) cuyas catastróficas consecuencias las podemos observar, ontogenéticamente, en la crescendo de la insatisfacción individual, y, filogenéticamente, en el curso destructuvo y alienante de la especie humana.
Ahora todas las piezas del 'rompitesta' encajan perfectamente, sobre todo para entender la debaclé y el Desquicio Irracional y la Desorientación en la que se encuentra la especie humana, la cual, después de haber ensayado todo sobre la superficie de la Tierra, sigue, con su llamado "progreso", sin saber adónde va ni que quiere en realidad, pués, con cada problema que 'soluciona', crea mil más, circulo vicioso del cual le es cada vez mas difícil escapar. Son de tal colosal magnitud las contradicciones, que, las mentes mas preclaras advierten una y otra vez, que, de continuarse así, el colapso es irreversible. No obstante, la demencial inercia de tal "progreso" es tan rígida en la incorreptibilidad en su curso...que nada parece hacer cambiar el rumbo de tal Irracionalidad.
