Psychotherapist and writer, born in Vienna, Austria. He studied with Freud, whom he revered, and at the University of Vienna (1938). During the Nazi regime, he was imprisoned at Dachau and Buchenwald (19389); his 1943 article on his experiences and insights would gain him wide recognition. Upon his release, he moved to the USA and worked at the University of Chicago (193942, 194473). As head of the university's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a treatment centre for severely disturbed children (194473), he developed a de-institutionalized environment of total support. He became particularly admired for his work with autistic children, though some of his methods were controversial, and in later years he published advice in the popular media on raising normal children. He published two books on the Nazi death camps, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (1960) and Surviving and Other Essays (1979, reprinted in 1986 as Surviving the Holocaust). He wrote more than 20 books on psychotherapy, including Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children (1950), The Children of the Dream (1969), and Freud and Man's Soul (1982).
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 - March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American writer and child psychologist. His "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, now largely disfavored,
enjoyed considerable currency and influence while Bettelheim was alive.
Background and career
Upon his father's death, Bettelheim was forced to leave university in order to care for his family lumber business.
Bettelheim traveled across Nazi state hospitals in Germany, during the infamous T-4 euthanasia program of the 1930s, the start of his research in mental patients. Bettelheim resumed his studies to become an accredited psychiatrist when he returned to Austria under the intense anti-Semitism of Nazi-era Germany.
By birth an Austrian Jew, Bettelheim was interned at Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps from 1938 to 1939. Records of his internment shown Bettelheim was hired as the camp doctor to overview camp prisoners' mental health.
He arrived in Australia in 1939 and later to the United States in 1943, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1944. Bettelheim eventually became a professor of psychology, teaching at the University of Chicago from 1944 until his retirement in 1973.
The most significant part of Bettelheim's professional life was spent serving as director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, a home for emotionally disturbed children.
Bettelheim suffered from depression at the end of his life, and in 1990 committed suicide.
Bettelheim's career can be viewed as a classic example of the dangers of pseudoscientific methodology. Bettelheim's most significant theory claimed that unemotional and cold mothering was the cause of childhood autism.
Bettelheim was convinced that autism had no organic basis but that it instead was mainly influenced by the upbringing of mothers who did not want their children to live, either consciously or unconsciously, which in turn caused them to restrain contact with them and fail to establish an emotional connection.
Other Freudian analysts, as well as scientists and medics, followed Bettelheim's lead. This led to some blaming the mother for the child's autism, a theory which Bettelheim was against.
Beyond Bettelheim's psychological theories, controversy has existed regarding his history and personality. After Bettelheim's suicide in 1990, his detractors claimed that Bettelheim had a dark side.
A movie appearance
Bruno Bettelheim accepted Woody Allen's invitation to appear as himself in the film Zelig (1983).
Bibliography
Major works
1943 "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417-452. 1967 The Empty Fortress: Infantile autism and the birth of the self, The Free Press, New York 1969 The Children of the Dream, Macmillan, London & New York (About the raising of children in kibbutz.) 1974 A Home for the Heart, Knopf, New York. (About Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago for schizophrenic and autistic children.) 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York 1979 Surviving and Other Essays, Knopf, New York (Includes the essay "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank".) 1982 On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning (with Karen Zelan), Knopf, New York 1982 "Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3Freud and Man's Soul, Knopf, New York
1987 A Good Enough Parent: A book on Child-Rearing, Knopf, New York 1990 Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, Knopf, New York
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