Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 - March 13, 1990) was a writer and child psychologist. When his father died, he had to leave university to take care of the family lumber business. After ten years he did go back however, and earned a degree in philosophy, writing a dissertation relating to the history of art. He was interested in psychology for much of his life but never studied it formally.

As a Jew in Austria, he was interned in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps (1938-39), but his way was bought out, as was possible before the war started. He arrived in the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized citizen in 1944. Here he eventually set himself up as a professor of psychology, teaching at the University of Chicago from 1944 until he retired in 1973. He was able to claim that he had the relevant training because the Nazis were destroying the records.

He spent the most significant part of his life as director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, a home for emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology, and was well respected by many during his lifetime. His book The Uses of Enchantment recast fairy tales in terms of the strictest Freudian psychology, sometimes to unintentionally hilarious effect.

He suffered from depression throughout his life, and died by suicide in 1990, six years after his wife died of cancer.

After his suicide, evidence of Bettelheim's dark side began to emerge. Although many of his counsellors at the Orthogenic School considered him brilliant and admirable, others began to openly question his work and to call him a cruel tyrant. Although untrained in analysis, Bettelheim was a Freudian fundamentalist. Bettelheim was convinced, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that autism had no organic basis but was caused entirely by cold mothers (dubbed as "refrigerator mothers" originally by Leo Kanner), and absent fathers. "All my life," he wrote, "I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them." Other Freudian analysts, as well as scientists who were not psychiatrists, followed Bettelheim in blaming mothers for their child's autism. This view is now regarded as erroneous, and Bettelheim's work is discredited.

Bettelheim wrote a book about this entitled The Empty Fortress.

In his "Lexikon der Fälschungen" (Dictionary of fraud) German author Werner Fuld claims that Mr. Bettelheim's biographical data is for a large part sheer fiction.

Bruno Bettelheim appears as himself in Woody Allen's famous mockumentary "Zelig" (1983).

Bibliography

Major works

• "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417-452.
• Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1950.
• Symbolic Wounds; Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1954
• Truants From Life; The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1955.
• "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'", Scientific American, 200, March 1959: 117-126. (About a boy who believes himself to be a robot.)
• The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1960.
• Dialogues with Mothers, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1962.
• The Empty Fortress: Infantile autism and the birth of the self, The Free Press, New York, 1967.
• The Children of the Dream, Macmillan, London & New York, 1969. (About the raising of children in kibbutz.)
• A Home for the Heart, Knopf, New York, 1974. (About Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago for schizophrenic and autistic children.)
• The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York, 1976.
• Surviving and Other Essays, Knopf, New York, 1979. (Includes the essay "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank".)
• With Karen Zelan: On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning, Knopf, New York, 1982.
• Freud and Man's Soul, Knopf, New York, 1982.
• A Good Enough Parent: A book on Child-Rearing, Knopf, New York, 1987.
• Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, Knopf, New York, 1990.

Critical Review of Bettelheim (Works and Person)

• Angres, Ronald: "Who, Really, Was Bruno Bettelheim?", Commentary, 90, (4), october 1990: 26-30.
• Bersihand, Geneviève : Bettelheim, R. Jauze, Champigny-sur-Marne, 1977.
• Frattaroli, Elio: "Bruno Bettelheim´s Unrecognized Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought", Psychoanalytic Review, 81:379-409, 1994.
• Eliot, Stephen: Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, St. Martin's Press, 2003.
• Heisig, James W.: "Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tales", Children's Literature, 6, 1977: 93-115.
• Krumenacker, Franz-Josef: Bettelheim: Grundpositionen seiner Theorie und Praxis, Reinhardt/UTB für Wissenschaft, München, 1998.
• Marcus, Paul: Autonomy in the Extreme Situation. Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Mass Society, Praeger, Westport, Conn., 1999.
• Pollak, Richard: The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.
• Raines, Theron: Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim, Knopf, New York, 2002.
• Sutton, Nina: Bruno Bettelheim: The Other Side of Madness, Duckworth Press, London, 1995. (Translated from the French by David Sharp in collaboration with the author. Subsequently published with the title Bruno Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy.)
• Zipes, Jack: "On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim's Moralistic Magic Wand", in Zipes, Jack: Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979.
• -Author unknown-: "Accusations of Abuse Haunt the Legacy of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim", New York Times, 4 November 1990: "The Week in Review" section.