Mowgli syndrome is a term used by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty in her 1995 book ‘Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes’ to describe mythological figures who succeed in bridging the animal and human worlds to become one with nature, a human animal, only to become trapped between the two worlds, not completely animal yet not entirely human.
It is also a rarely-used descriptive term for so-called feral children. The term originates from the character Mowgli, a fictional feral child from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book.’
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