A Curious Parallel

[Gary Freedman]

Kyle XY was an American drama television series. The show revolved around a boy named Kyle, who awakened in a forest outside Seattle, Washington, suffering from amnesia. The series followed Kyle as he tried to understand the mysteries of who he was and why he had no memory of being a child. He was sometimes shown with his shirt partially removed, revealing that he lacked a navel.

The fictional television drama Kyle XY, broadcast on the ABC network in the summer of 2006, has close parallels to the actual case of Kaspar Hauser. Hauser was the subject of Jeffrey Masson's 1996 book, "Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser." The following account is drawn from Leonard Shengold's 1989 book, "Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation."

The case of Kaspar Hauser was a cause celebre in his time, the early nineteenth century. Imprisoned in a dark cellar, he had been cut off from all human contact except for an occasional glimpse of his jailer (whom he called "the Man who was always there"). When Kaspar was turned loose he was discovered wandering in the streets of Nuremberg, Germany, at seventeen more a baby than a man.

Here are details of an eyewitness account: "He appeared neither to know or to suspect where he was. He betrayed neither fear, nor astonishment, nor confusion; he rather showed an almost brutish dullness . . . his tears and whimpering, while he was always pointing to his tottering feet [he seemed not to know how to walk correctly], and his awkward, and, at the same time, childish demeanor, soon excited the compassion of all present . . . his whole conduct . . . seemed to be that of a child scarcely two or three years old, with the body of a young man."

Kaspar had to be taught to speak and walk properly, to learn the difference between the organic and the inorganic. He showed an intense, passionate wish to learn and displayed unusual powers (he could distinguish colors in the dark, for example). Kaspar seemed asexual and incapable of anger; he showed no indignation at "the Man who was always there." It was as if some instinctual energy had been extinguished. When his teacher and protector, Anselm von Feuerbach, expressed surprise that Kaspar "should wish to return to that abominably bad man, Kaspar replied with mild indignation, 'Man not bad, man me no bad done.'" There proved no way of making up for the emotional deficits, and after a period of wonderful intellectual promise (the observers talked of genius) Kaspar, his mind unprepared emotionally to grasp how much he had been deprived of, gradually regressed into a kind of obsessive-compulsive automaton. His pathetic story (which led to romantic speculation that he was of royal blood) and the excitement of his education and subsequent murder were followed by thousands of readers in the newspapers of Europe. Von Feuerbach, who befriended Kaspar and helped care for him, wrote indignantly about Kaspar's imprisonment and "the cruel withholding from him of . . . all the means of mental development and culture -- the unnatural detention of a human soul in a state of irrational animality."

Even after his release at Nuremberg, Kaspar was subject to states of hypnosis and stuporous sleep.

Von Feuerbach writes: "Having been sunk during the whole of the earlier part of his life in animal sleep, Kaspar has passed through this extensive and beautiful part of it, without having lived through it. His existence was, during all this time, similar to that of a person really dead: in having slept through his youthful years, they have been passed by him, without his having had them in his possession; because he was rendered unable to become conscious of their existence. This chasm, which crime has torn in his life, cannot any more be filled up; that time, in which he omitted to live, can never be brought back, that it may be lived through; that juvenility, which fled while his soul was asleep, can never be overtaken. How long soever he may live, he must for ever remain a man without childhood, and boyhood, a monstrous being, who, contrary to the usual course of nature, only began to live in the middle of his life. Inasmuch as all the earlier part of his life was thus taken from him, he may be said to have been the subject of a partial soul-murder . . . the life of a human soul was mutilated at its commencement."

Kaspar Hauser was eventually stabbed to death in a public park by a mysterious stranger, thought to be his jailer, or an agent in the jailer's employ. It is believed that his jailer wanted the facts of Kaspar's childhood imprisonment to be remain secret.

Will I meet the same fate as Kaspar Hauser?

[Alendar]

I believe that show was cancelled.

[Gary Freedman]

I loved the first season of Kyle XY. I identified strongly with the character from out of nowhere, who knew nothing about himself, and who spent all his time trying to figure out who he was.