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Bruno Bettelheim (Vienna, Austria; August 28, 1903 – Chicago, United States; March 13, 1990) was an Austrian psychoanalyst and psychologist.

Biography

Well into his 30s, he had to take care of the family as a result of the premature death of his father. Once his financial problems were resolved, he finished his philosophy studies at the University of Vienna. He married and adopted a child. When Austria was annexed to Germany, due to his Jewish status in Austria, he was a prisoner in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps from 1938 to 1939, for eleven months. He was released as a result of an amnesty that Hitler declared that year on the occasion of his birthday.

He arrived in the United States in 1941, where he remarried and had three children. He was analyzed by psychoanalyst Richard Sterba. He obtained American citizenship in 1944.

He became interested in autism, but from a position that obviously separates him from Leo Kanner, one of the first scientists to describe this disorder. Faced with clinical experience and scientific and neurobiological research, Bettelheim adopted a more doctrinal stance, starting from psychoanalytic postulates (such as the parents' supposed initial rejection of the neonate as a means of self-protection) and also trying to incorporate genetic epistemology. by Piaget. His experience of isolation in the concentration camps led him to hypothesize that autism was a consequence of poor educational practice, and he popularized the term "refrigerator mothers"; to refer to maternal distancing as the cause of the disorder. This pseudoscientific theory turned out to be iatrogenic, making mothers feel guilty that their children suffered from what is actually a neurological and genetic disorder that has nothing to do with the parenting behaviors of mothers or fathers. In 1947 he founded and was director of the Chicago Orthogenic School, where children were separated from their mothers to undertake a therapy that was supposed to reeducate his patients. From 1963, he was a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

He spent much of his life as director of a section at the University of Chicago, which served as a home for emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books about the normal and abnormal psychology of children.

In 1987 he was paralyzed by a stroke and three years later he suffered from depression and committed suicide in 1990, six years after his wife died of cancer.

After his death, allegations surfaced about the falsification of credentials, plagiarism, and physical and sexual abuse of patients admitted to his schools.

Influence

At a time when psychoanalysis was in vogue in America, the impact of his work was enormous. He attributed autism to the parenting style of his parents, creating serious self-blame problems in these children. The very term autism became diffuse and abused in diagnosis, becoming almost a fad.

But, little by little, the scarce scientific base caused the contributions of Bettelheim and those of the psychoanalytic school on autism to decline. Since the 21st century , his theories have been criticized and replaced by others based on scientific evidence and experimental data in Good practice guidelines in the treatment of autism.

Work

He is the author of the book The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales first published in Great Britain by Thames and Hudson in 1976. Through this book he explains the importance of fairy tales in children's lives and translates their symbolic contents.

• 1943 "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417-452
• 1950 Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed ChildrenFree Press, Glencoe, Ill.
• 1954 Symbolic Wounds; Puberty Rites and the Envious MaleFree Press, Glencoe, Ill.
• 1955 Truants From Life; The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed ChildrenFree Press, Glencoe, Ill.
• 1959 "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'", Scientific American, 200, March 1959: 117-126. (About a boy who believes himself to be a robot)
• 1960 The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass AgeThe Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
• 1962 Dialogues with Mothers (Dialogues with Normal Mothers)The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
• 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 HeartKnopf, New York. (About the Orthogenic School of Bettelheim, 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 (Learn to read) (with Karen Zelan), Knopf, New York
• 1982 Freud and Man's Soul, Knopf, 1983, ISBN 0-394-52481-0
• 1987 A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, Knopf, New York
• 1990 Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, Knopf, New York
• 1994 Bettelheim, Bruno & Ekstein, Rudolf: Grenzgänge zwischen den Kulturen. Das letzte Gespräch zwischen Bruno Bettelheim und Rudolf Ekstein. In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1994): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz (Grünewald): 49–60

Film appearance

Bruno Bettelheim accepted Woody Allen's invitation to appear in the 1983 film Zelig.