Extreme Social Isolation of a Child

Abstract

A girl of more than five years was discovered incarcerated in an upstairs room. She had apparently been there since babyhood and was physically malnourished and apathetic as well as mentally blank. Taken first to county home, then to a foster-home, and finally to a school for detective children, she improved very slowly. She is still a virtually unsocialized creature, manifesting many parallels with other cases of isolated children and bearing out the Cooley-Mead-Dewey-Faris theory of socialization.