Secrets of the Wild Child 4

First time she saw helium balloon, she couldn't believe him. The fact that she could let them go up and pull them back down again. She had, you know, it's kind of laughed at some people have. And it's just a full out chuckle it's so contagious. Everybody run and start to laugh. Well, they made her laugh like that. One of my memories was that we would go to a place that woolworths were there would be a stand of spools of thread. And spools were each color thread would incrementally change from the spools next to it. And she wanted a word for every different hue. And I didn't know. I mean, I had a box of 64 crayola crayons, a child, and I remembered burnt Sienna and all these colors that I tried to extract from my memory, but I don't English doesn't have words for all of these different shoes. And she was very frustrated when I would say very dark blue and very, very dark blue. For Jeannie, every new object, every field trip was a visit to a Magic Kingdom. The previous fall the world had discovered Genie, now Genie could discover the world. It was a time that she passed a father and a little boy who were coming out of a shop, and a little boy was carrying a toy fire engine. And they just passed, and then they turned around and came back, and the boy without a word handed the fire engine to Jeannie. She never asked for it. She never said a word. She did this kind of thing somehow to people. Could I imagine what that was like? Could I see things with her eyes? I don't believe so. I don't believe I really could. Sometimes I could understand and guess pretty well. What she was gonna do, but that was familiarity and not an ability, I think, to empathize with understand the way she saw the world. The summer after her discovery was a time of firsts for Jeannie. Water? And get a glass of water, you can. The most significant happened here in the home of Jean butler, her teacher at children's hospital. Genie moved in. You can get water, get a glass. It was a new step for Genie. Her first trial run in a foster home. Is that what you want? This is July 11th. This is butler's house. This is lunchtime. If you just took the email and the chocolate melt into the bedroom, here, butler videotapes, Jeannie's passion for hoarding things, especially containers of liquid. Although there is no obvious explanation, this has been reported in other cases of children raised in isolation. Genie began living here after butler said she had exposed Genie to German measles. It began as a temporary quarantine. Butler wanted to make it permanent. Butler, shown here with Jeannie and James Kent, wanted to be Jeannie's official foster parent. And she wanted to see changes in the handling of genius case. Butler thought frequent visits by team members can't and Susan Curtis were exhausting Genie. That was the summer when we were then both disallowed into gene butler's house. So, you know, we didn't. We didn't have such a fun summer. It was a summer that included weeks of concern and anxiety and anger and all kinds of things because he and I were kicked out of. His house. And she didn't want the other attachments. I mean, she wanted. She used to walk around saying, I'm like, I am going to be the next daddy Sullivan. This girl is going to make me famous. And we used it to joke about it because she was so overt about it and I thought that why doesn't, you know, even if she has the desire, why is it she's so willing to tell the rest of us, but she certainly found a way to Congress you concocted this story. The whole thing is untrue. She didn't have German measles. She had a rash. Oh, the bickering continued for more than a month, according to journals left behind by gene butler, who died in 1988. Butler wrote, she feared Jeannie was being experimented with too much. Are you going to do that again? Whether this was butler's true motivation in keeping away other team members can not be known. But it raised again the issue of how Genie should be treated. Could she be a scientific subject and still be a patient? On the morning of August 13th, social work has arrived at butler's house with a decision on her application to be Jeannie's foster parent. Partly on advice from children's hospital, it was rejected. We were not satisfied with the quality of the care. That Genie was able what had a gene butler's. So that had to be interrupted. And again, it was up to up to management IES to interrupt that. Genie returned to children's hospital for only a couple of hours, a new foster parent came to take her home. It was David rigler. Wriggler decided to take charge of the case. He decided to take over Kent's role as therapist, and also be Genie's foster parent and the principal investigator. Ordinarily, mental health people are not involved in these kinds of multiple roles, but I have to stress how desperate we were to find a place that was appropriate. And I remember making the commitment in my mind for a three month period, which obviously got extended much longer. And she was with us approximately four years. Jeannie's new home was in a neighborhood near children's hospital. She lived here with David rigler, his wife, Maryland, and the regular children. We really didn't know what to expect, except that we knew that Jeannie needed a great deal of help. And on the other hand, it was very exciting to feel that perhaps we could help her, and perhaps she could be rehabilitated. Marilyn, a graduate student in human development, was Genie's new teacher. She soon found herself giving Jeannie unconventional lessons. Jeannie would erupt in silent storms of rage, tugging and tearing her own body. To turn Genie's self destructive anger outward, Marilyn taught her how to have a fit, how to slam doors and stamp her feet. Eventually, Maryland encouraged Jeannie to turn her pain and anger into words. And there came a time when she could say rough time. And sometimes she could tell you the degree of how upset she was by waiting one finger, which meant she was very upset. Or kind of waving her hand, which meant she was upset, but it wasn't going to be a big deal. I. Just let's see you jump. One of Maryland's first tasks was to awaken in Jeannie a sense of her connection to the physical world. March. March. Tell me what I'm doing. Like her historic counterpart Victor, Jeannie seemed disconnected from certain bodily sensations. I would allow her to run her own bath water or her own shower water. And when I would touch it, I would realize it was icy cold. And I would say, oh, this is so cold. You're gonna freeze. And it was as though it didn't make any difference. In their new role as Jeannie's foster parents, the griggs were suddenly responsible for a child who needed full-time supervision. They also took responsibility for Genie's therapy, attempts to help her grapple with the horror of her childhood. Open your mouth. In this primitive role playing exercise, Marilyn pretends to be Genie's mother. Hurry up. Hurry up because there isn't any time. Father's gonna be angry. Marilyn tries to elicit memories of Genie's past. I wonder what you're thinking.