Bettelheim's life and work have been called into question since his death, specifically in a critical biography by Richard Pollak (1997).
Misrepresented credentials Though he spent most of his life working in psychology and psychiatry, Bettelheim's educational background in those fields is murky at best. Sources disagree whether Bettelheim's PhD was in art history or in philosophy (aesthetics). When he was hired at the University of Chicago,
Ralph W. Tyler assumed that he had two PhDs, one in art history and the other in psychology. He also believed, falsely, that Bettelheim was certified to conduct
psychoanalysis though Bettelheim never received such certification. A review in
The Independent (UK) of Sutton's book stated that Bettelheim "despite claims to the contrary, possessed no psychology qualifications of any sort". Another review in
The New York Times by a different reviewer stated that Bettelheim "began inventing degrees he never earned". In his 1997 review of Pollak's book in the
Baltimore Sun,
Paul R. McHugh, then director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins, stated "Bettelheimwith boldness, energy and luckexploited American deference to Freudo-Nietzschean mind-sets and interpretation, especially when intoned in accents Viennese." He argued that Bettelheim had copied from a variety of sources, including Dundes' own 1967 paper on Cinderella, but most of all from Julius E. Heuscher's 1963 book
A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (revised edition 1974). On the other hand, Jacquelyn Sanders, who worked with Bettelheim and later became director of the Orthogenic School, stated that she had read Dundes' article but disagreed with its conclusions: "I would not call that plagiarism. I think the article is a reasonable scholarly endeavor, and calling it scholarly etiquette is appropriate. It is appropriate that this man deserved to be acknowledged and Bettelheim didn't… But I would not fail a student for doing that, and I don't know anybody who would". editorials, articles, A November 1990
Chicago Tribune article states: "Of the 19 alumni of the Orthogenic School interviewed for this story, some are still bitterly angry at Bettelheim, 20 or 30 years after leaving the institution due to the trauma they had suffered under him. Others say their stays did them good, and they express gratitude for having had the opportunity to be at the school. All agree that Bettelheim frequently struck his young and vulnerable patients." Jacquelyn Sanders, who later became director of the Orthogenic School, said she thought it was a case of Bettelheim getting too much success too quickly. "Dr. B got worse once he started getting acclaim", she said. "He was less able to have any insight into his effect on these kids." As an example, David Zwerdling, who was a counselor at the school for one year in 1969–70, wrote a September 1990 response to
The Washington Post in which he stated, "I witnessed one occasion when an adolescent boy cursed at a female counselor. Incensed upon learning of this, Dr. Bettelheim proceeded to slap the boy two or three times across the face, while telling him sternly never to speak that way to a woman again. This was the only such incident I observed or heard of during my year at the school… until fairly recently, the near-consensus against corporal punishment in schools did not obtain." However, Zwerdling also noted, "He also was a man who, for whatever reasons, was capable of intense anger on occasion."
Institutional and professional non-responses Perhaps in part because of Bettelheim's professional and public stature, there was little effort during his lifetime to curtail his behavior or intervene on behalf of his victims. His work at the
University of Chicago seems to have been given less formal oversight by the university than other research entities under their purview. A
Newsweek article reported that Chicago-area psychiatrists had privately given him the nickname "Brutalheim", but did nothing to intervene effectively on behalf of students at the school. Professionals in the psychiatric and psychological communities likely knew there were allegations of abuse and maltreatment at the Orthogenic School. Bettelheim was a prominent proponent of a psychogenic account of autism, which held that autism had origins in early childhood events or trauma acting on the child from the outside. For Bettelheim, the idea that outside forces cause individual behavior issues can be traced back to his earliest prominent article on the psychology of imprisoned persons. Bettelheim believed that autism resulted when mothers withheld appropriate affection from their children and failed to make a good connection with them. Bettelheim popularized the
Leo Kanner's term "refrigerator mother" to describe such allegedly distant mothers. Bettelheim also blamed absent or weak fathers. Jordynn Jack writes that Bettelheim's ideas gained currency and became popular in large part because society already tended to blame a mother first and foremost for her child's difficulties. As Lisa D. Benaron describes in her book
Autism, "Although it now seems beyond comprehension that anyone would believe that autism is caused by deep-seated issues arising in early childhood relationships, virtually every psychiatric condition was attributed to parent-child relationships in the 1940s and 1950s, when Freudian psychoanalytic theory was in its heyday." Bettelheim adapted and transformed the
Orthogenic School at the
University of Chicago as a residential treatment
milieu for such children, who he felt would benefit from a "
parentectomy". This marked the apex of autism viewed as a disorder of parenting. One of his most famous books,
The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms. These views were disputed at the time by mothers of autistic children and by researchers. He derived his thinking from the qualitative investigation of clinical cases. He also related the world of autistic children to conditions in concentration camps. Beginning in the 1960s and into the 1970s, "biogenesis", the idea that such conditions had an inner-organic or biological basis overtook psychogenesis, and currently, Bettelheim's theories in which he attributes
autism spectrum conditions to parenting style have been largely discredited, and his reporting rates of cure have been questioned, with critics stating that his patients were not actually autistic. By his 1987 book,
A Good Enough Parent, he had embraced
Winnicott's concept of the
good enough parent and still described children "without being truly autistic" presenting "symptoms of autism" as the result of childhood deprivation. The two biographies by Sutton (1995) and Pollak (1997) awakened interest and focus on Bettelheim's actual methods as distinct from his public persona. In a favorable review of Pollak's biography, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of
The New York Times wrote, "What scanty evidence remains suggests that his patients were not even autistic in the first place."
Michael Rutter has observed, "Many people made a mistake in going from a statement which is undoubtedly true—that there is no evidence that autism has been caused by poor parenting—to the statement that it has been disproven. It has not actually been disproven. It has faded away simply because, on the one hand, of a lack of convincing evidence and on the other hand, an awareness that autism was a neurodevelopmental disorder of some kind." Although Bettelheim foreshadowed the modern interest in the causal influence of genetics in the section
Parental Background, he consistently emphasised nurture over nature. For example: "When at last the once totally frozen affects begin to emerge, and a much richer human personality to evolve, then convictions about the psychogenic nature of the disturbance become stronger still.";
On Treatability, p. 412. The rates of recovery claimed for the Orthogenic School are set out in
Follow-up Data, with a recovery good enough to be considered a 'cure' of 43%, pp. 414–15. Subsequently, medical research has provided greater understanding of the biological basis of autism and other illnesses. Scientists such as
Bernard Rimland challenged Bettelheim's view of autism by arguing that autism is a
neurodevelopmental issue. As late as 2009, the "refrigerator mother" theory retained some prominent supporters, including the prominent Irish psychologist
Tony Humphreys. His theory still enjoys widespread support in France. In his book
Unstrange Minds (2007), Roy Richard Grinker wrote:
Robert Sapolsky comments:Bruno Bettelheim was a fraud and a monster. He faked his data, he faked his European academic credentials when he came to the US as a refugee. He was a sadistic bastard to autistic children who wound up in his program, to people under his mentorship who he was sort of leading along in their careers. And he persisted with this long after there was definitive proof that there was no such thing as a refrigerator mothering cause of autism and he went to his grave refusing to apologize. A vile monstrous person, and a really interesting study in that he was not deceiving himself--he damn well knew what a fraud he was.
Remarks about Jews and the Holocaust Bettelheim's experiences during the
Holocaust shaped his personal and professional life for years after. His first publication was "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" derived from his experiences at
Dachau and
Buchenwald. His later work frequently compared emotionally disturbed childhood to prison or confinement, and according to Sutton, his professional work attempted to operationalize the lessons about human nature he learned during his confinement. Bettelheim became one of the most prominent defenders of
Hannah Arendt's book
Eichmann in Jerusalem. He wrote a positive review for
The New Republic. This review prompted a letter from a writer,
Harry Golden, who alleged that both Bettelheim and Arendt suffered from "an essentially Jewish phenomenon… self-hatred". Bettelheim would later speak critically of
Jewish people who were killed during the
Holocaust. He has been criticized for promoting the myth that Jews went "
like sheep to the slaughter" and for blaming
Anne Frank and her family for their own deaths due to not owning firearms, fleeing, or hiding more effectively. In an introduction he wrote to an account by
Miklos Nyiszli, Bettelheim stated, discussing Frank, that "Everybody who recognized the obvious knew that the hardest way to go underground was to do it as a family; that to hide as a family made detection by the SS most likely. The Franks, with their excellent connections among gentile Dutch families should have had an easy time hiding out singly, each with a different family. But instead of planning for this, the main principle of their planning was to continue as much as possible with the kind of family life they were accustomed to." ==Bibliography==