UNDERSTANDING FERAL BOYS

Sorting cats by behavior because they all look pretty much the same except for coat color has its parallel for boys, who can also be sorted by behavior from compliant to defiant.  Like cats, boys can go from tame to feral and back again, and tame is seen as better by most — but not all — people.  This is mostly a survival-driven dynamic with the driver being the culture in most cases, using stigma as a source of control.  The “culture”— which is a made-up, imaginary concept with real consequences — tries to preserve itself by sacrificing persons they see as damaging, mostly because they are different.

In the past we’ve seen this as psychological, a matter of ideas, maybe driven by invented unconscious forces (id, ego, thanatos).  Psychotherapy is meant to improve the situation by understanding it better.  But in recent years we’ve been able to see the organic, molecular, “real” consequences of behavior/ideas in terms of brain development, and have begun to understand how brain cells carry ideas, sometimes controlling them, making them persist even when unwanted.

Right now the brain of Paddock, the Mandalay Bay shooter, is being dissected in the hopes of finding an explanation for his behavior, maybe a tumor or lesion.  But the function of the brain is not in its structure (parallel to the idea of organs) so much as its operation, its connectome — the tiny filaments that meet in electromagnetic connections that persist as both memory of experience and plan for new action.  The building and foundation of this brain process begins before birth and is crucially formed in the earliest years of life.

I watch the news clips showing endless lines of people thrown out of their homes, their countries, family people of all ages and both genders, walking on dirt paths, carrying little more than something to sleep on and a plastic jug for water.  And the babies.  Always the naked babies clasped close so they ride their mother’s hip.  Even the children, still almost babies themselves, carry the babies.  What are the brains of those babies doing?  What little flickering sparks are moving around in brains without enough nutrients to grow properly?

I look at the Victorian photos of street kids, mostly boys, filthy in short pants, newsboy caps, broken high-top shoes.  I look at contemporary photos of kids a little older, piled up together like street cats pillowing on each other in places street cats seek out.  How can they be anything but feral?  Not to each other -- just to the adult world.

Centers of psychological study form in cities and prestige universities, and naturally center on the issues of people there.  In Manhattan there has been a critical mass of WWII displaced educated Jews who work with theoretical psych systematics, so that Woody Allen, famous for his constantly reviewed neuroticism, seems never to have had his treatment of women challenged, even when it exceeds normal boundaries.

A more appealing center of thought is in Britain where Winnicott, Bowlby, Schore, Hughes and others have developed ideas about primary attachment so basic (beginning to form during gestation, even in the earliest months) and so broad (including every impingement from the mother’s molecular blood content as it varies when she deals with her dilemmas) that even large environmental forces (radioactivity, toxics, abuse, food insecurity) all make a difference.  (You’ve read about DDT in mother’s milk.)  This is the kind of theory I find most helpful when exploring the dimension of feral/tame in any mammal.  

Attachment theory looks at human relationships, esp. the caregiver vs. the unfolding infant.  Mothers are best caregivers during pregnancy if they can take care of themselves, which means a family or other protective setting.  If they hope to be domestic, they need a domicile.

Once a baby is born to a poor caregiver, genetic or not, it can be removed by social services to a paid caregiver.  The problem is, in part, that a child already taught to distrust will have patterns that are meant to say, “Keep away!  “I won’t.”  “Leave me alone!” and even will attack, because they have learned that people who approach them will hurt them some way, maybe at best by leaving, abandoning them.  They are making pre-emptive strikes, often very successful.

Brit murder mysteries are one of my evening unwinding practices.  I notice how often the murderer is detected, explained and caught because ultimately it is the result of a failure of attachment or a raging distrust so intense that it has become lethal.  There is rarely a mention of “sin” or “evil,” but many images of the torn bodies who have become targets of revenge against early abuse and neglect.  The bookend for that is persons who have tried to alleviate their pain with drugs and are now numb.  And addicted.  And so pawns.  They do not imagine Hell is a perpetual pit of burning agony, but rather Hell is endlessly falling through an icy abyss of dark and cold meaninglessness.

American police procedurals (I watch the new version of “Hawaii 5-0” -- for the scenery) are often focused on violent evil people, no explanation of how they came to be that way, but only the necessity of heroism in capturing them and the lack of cooperation on the part of government to get that done.  Children are innocent, sometimes victims.  Ironically, given the Manichean good/evil premise, no religious system is ever explored — just the church as setting.  Maybe an exotic ceremony.  (Hawaii)

When I look at all these theories and contexts, I can’t help coming back to myself and my family.  I see signs that some have been “interfered with” in the English euphemism.  I see patterns of distrust and closing out what could be helpful, partly because of past economic insecurity.  I see competitive presentations of “front,” and the valuing of economic advantages that aren’t exactly morally defensible.  There are little threads of consequences:  alcoholism, depression, distant emotion, hated jobs, unsettled children.  

But few have become outright feral or even have much contact with feral people.  They are “white” in two flavors:  Scots/Canadians with the thrift and caution of those cultures, or Irish with the quickness to blame and the cockamamie sense of humor.  Not genetic qualities but “memes” learned from cultures with certain prescriptions for survival as they developed in the 19th century of immigration and frontier settlement — not really relevant now.  For instance, the patriarch who imposes his standards on the family for the sake of pulling them together has become a hated figure in literature, and yet we look for a single male ultra-strong figure to save us.

This is one of the ways we have filled America with feral boys escaping their fathers, distrusting their mothers.  The whole culture is shaping the outcome.  We have now become dominated by emotions developed in a right brain lobe traumatized by neglect on one hand and smothering on the other.