by Oliver Sacks
THE COMMUNITY AND LANGUAGE OF THE DEAF
Demographic surveys are usually dull, but Jerome Schein is incapable of being dull. The Deaf Population of the United States, by Jerome D. Schein and Marcus T. Delk, Jr., provides a vivid cross-section of the deaf population in the United States fifteen years ago, at a time when major changes were just starting to occur. Also recommended are Schein’s Speaking the Language of Sign and At Home Among Strangers.
It is interesting to compare and contrast the situation of the deaf and their Sign in Britain. A fine account is given by J. G. Kyle and B. Woll, in Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and Their Language.
A splendid overview of the deaf community is Sign Language and the Deaf Community: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe, edited by Charlotte Baker and Robbin Battison. There is not a single essay in this volume that is less than fascinating—and there is also an important and moving looking-back by Stokoe himself.
An extraordinary book—the more so because its authors are deaf, and can speak from within (as well as about) the deaf community—its organization, its aspirations, its images, its beliefs, its arts, its language, etc.—is Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries.
Also very accessible for the general reader and full of vivid interviews with members of the deaf community is Arden Neisser’s The Other Side of Silence: Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America.
A real treasure for browsing (even if the volumes are a little too heavy to read in bed, and a little too costly to read in the bath) is the Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, edited by John Van Cleve. One of the delights of this encyclopedia (as of all the best encyclopedias) is that one can open it anywhere and find illumination and enjoyment.
CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION OF THE DEAF
In the works of Jerome Bruner one can trace how a revolutionary psychology can in turn revolutionize education. Particularly remarkable in this context are Bruner’s Towards a Theory of Instruction and his Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language.
An important “Bruneresque” study of the development and education of deaf children is provided by David Wood, Heather Wood, Amanda Griffiths, and Ian Howarth in Teaching and Talking with Deaf Children.
Hilde Schlesinger’s recent work is only to be found in the professional literature, which is not always readily available. But her earlier book is both vivid and accessible: Hilde S. Schlesinger and Kathryn P. Meadow, Sound and Sign: Childhood Deafness and Mental Health.
Observation and psychoanalysis are powerfully combined in Dorothy Burlingham’s Psychoanalytic Studies of the Sighted and the Blind; one wishes a similar study could be made of deaf children.
Daniel Stern also conjoins direct observation and analytic construction in The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Stern is particularly interesting on the development of a “verbal self.”
GRAMMAR, LINGUISTICS, AND SIGN
The linguistic genius of our time is Noam Chomsky, who has written a dozen books on language since his revolutionary (1957) Syntactic Structures. I find the most vivid and readable are his 1967 Beckman Lectures, reprinted as Language and Mind.
The central figure in Sign linguistics, since 1970, has been Ursula Bellugi. None of her work is exactly popular reading, but one can glimpse fascinating vistas and dip with much pleasure into the encyclopedic The Signs of Language by Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi. Bellugi and her colleagues have also been the foremost investigators of the neural basis of Sign; here too one may gain a sense of the fascinations of the subject in Howard Poizner, Edward S. Klima, and Ursula Bellugi, What the Hands Reveal About the Brain.
GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE
Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown’s Words and Things.
Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language.
The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.”
A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church’s Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Though he may (or may not) be dated, there is great interest in all the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and his incessant pondering on “primitive” language and thought: his first book, How Natives Think, originally published in 1910, gives the flavor of him well.
Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures has to be by one’s side the moment one thinks about “culture”—and it is a crucial corrective to primitive, romantic thoughts about pure and unadulterated, uncultivated human nature.
But, equally, one has to read Rousseau—to read him again in the light of the deaf and their language: I find his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality the richest, the most balanced, of his works.
WILD AND ISOLATED HUMAN BEINGS
Unique views of what human beings are like if deprived of their normal language and culture are provided by these rare and fearful, but crucially important human phenomena (each of which, Lord Monboddo says, is more important than the discovery of 30,000 stars). Thus, not accidentally, Harlan Lane’s first book was The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Another superb story is Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.
Anselm von Feuerbach’s 1832 account of Kaspar Hauser is one of the most amazing psychological documents of the nineteenth century. In English, it was published as Caspar Hauser.
It is again more than coincidental that Werner Herzog conceived and directed not only a very powerful film of Kaspar Hauser, but also a film on the deaf and the blind, Land of Darkness and Silence.
The deepest contemporary pondering on “the soul murder” of Kaspar Hauser is to be found in a brilliant psychoanalytical essay by Leonard Shengold, in Halo in the Sky: Observations on Anality and Defense.
It is well worth looking at Susan Curtiss’s minutely detailed study of a “wild child” found in California in 1970, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child.”
Finally, an enthralling and minutely-detailed account of a modern-day Massieu, a deaf man who reached adulthood with no language of any sort, but later acquired language, and how his life and mind changed with this, has been provided by Susan Schaller in A Man without Words.