Bruno Bettelheim

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Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born public intellectual and author who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States.

An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally.

Imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1930s, he arrived in the United States as a refugee under a program for scholars fleeing Europe.

In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.Bettelheim theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be "cured" through extended psychoanalytic therapy, treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy.

During the 1960s and 1970s he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.

Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of abusive treatment of patients under his care, and accusations of plagiarism.

Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of Freud's, about alleged subconscious injury caused by mothers of troubled children are now seen as particularly damaging. The University of Chicago was later criticized for not providing their normal oversight during Bettelheim's tenure.

Chicago area psychiatrists were also later criticized for knowing at least some of what was occurring regarding the physical abuse of patients, and not taking effective action.

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Life and career in the United States

Bettelheim arrived in New York City in late 1939 as a migrant, to marry Gina, who had already emigrated. They split because she had become involved with someone else during their separation. He migrated to Chicago, became a naturalized United States citizen in 1944, and married Gertrude ('trudi') Weinfeld, an Austrian immigrant from Vienna.

The Rockefeller Foundation funded a wartime initiative to help resettle European scholars by circulating their resumes to American universities. Ralph Tyler hired Bettelheim to be his research assistant at the University of Chicago from 1939 to 1941, with funds from the Progressive Education Association to investigate how high schools taught art. Bettelheim found a job at Rockford College, Illinois, where he taught from 1942 to 1944.

He released the book "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" about his experience in the concentration camps in 1943, which was largely regarded by Dwight Eisenhower and others. Bettelheim claimed to have interviewed 1,500 prisoners, but this was unlikely. Richard Sterba, the Viennese psychoanalyst, had investigated him, as well as implying in several of his books that he had written a PhD dissertation on education philosophy, according to him. His true PhD was in art history, but he had only taken three introductory psychology courses.

Bettelheim was recruited as a professor of psychology and as the head of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for emotionally troubled children through Ralph Tyler's recommendation. He served in both roles from 1944 to 1973. He wrote a number of books on psychology, gained a following for his studies on Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally troubled children.

Bettelheim made changes and created a milieu for milieu therapy, where children could form strong bonds with adults in a structured yet caring environment. He had a great deal of success in helping some of the mentally ill children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal childhood psychology, and he became a major figure in the field, with a large following during his lifetime. He was praised for his research of feral children, who revert to the animal world without knowing the advantages of belonging to a community. In the book The Informed Heart, he discussed this phenomenon. Even critics agree that Bettelheim was committed to assisting these children with tools and techniques that would enable them to live happy lives. Psychotherapy can change people and help them adapt to their environment if they are treated with proper care and attention.

In 1971, Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since retiring in 1973, he and his wife migrated to Portola Valley, California, where he continued to write and teach at Stanford University. His wife died in 1984.

In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bettelheim analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. He addressed the emotional and symbolic value of fairy tales for children, as well as traditional tales that were once thought too bleak, such as those that were collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Traditional fairy tales, befreying abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, Bettelheim suggested, encouraged children to wrestle with their fears in obscure, symbolic terms. They'd gain a greater sense of meaning and purpose if they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, according to he. Children will go through a psychological transformation that will better prepare them for their own futures, according to Bettelheim. Bettelheim received two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought in the United States.

However, well-backed accusations of plagiarism against Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment were brought against him in 1991, mainly because he had borrowed from Julian Herscher's 1963 A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales (revised). 1974 (in the United States).

Bettelheim suffered from depression at the end of his life. For a large portion of his life, he seemed to have suffered with depression. He killed himself in 1990 after widowed, in poor physical shape, and paralyzed a portion of his body, causing a stroke that limited his cognitive skills and paralyzed a portion of his body, causing self-induced asphyxiation by placing a plastic bag over his head. He died in Maryland on March 13, 1990.

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