Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer 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. 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's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated 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.

Some of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community. =

In the New York Review of Books, Robert Gottlieb describes Pollak as a "relentlessly negative biographer," but Gottlieb still writes: "The accusations against Bettelheim fall into several categories. First, he lied; that is, he both exaggerated his successes at the school and falsified aspects of his background, claiming a more elaborate academic and psychoanalytic history in Vienna than he had actually had. There is conclusive evidence to support both charges." Gottlieb goes on to say that Bettelheim arrived in the United States as a Holocaust survivor and refugee without a job nor even a profession, and writes: "I suspect he said what he thought it was necessary to say, and was then stuck with these claims later on, when he could neither confirm them (since they were false) nor, given his pride, acknowledge that he had lied."

Richard Pollak's biography begins with a personal account, for his brother died in an accident while home from Bettelheim's school on holiday. While playing hide-and-go-seek in a hay loft, the brother fell through a chute covered with hay and hit the concrete floor on the level below. Years later, Pollak hoped to get some information about his brother's life and sought out Bettelheim. As Pollak recounts, "Bettelheim immediately launched into an attack. The boys' father, he said, was a simple-minded 'schlemiel.' Their mother, he insisted, had rejected Stephen at birth forcing him to develop 'pseudo-feeble-mindedness' to cope." He went on to angrily ask: "What is it about these Jewish mothers, Mr. Pollak?" Bettelheim furthermore insisted the brother had committed suicide and made it look like an accident. Pollak did not believe this.

As a review in the Baltimore Sun states, "The stance of infallibility over matters Pollak knew to be untrue prompted him to wonder about the foundation of Bettelheim's commanding reputation."

In a 1997 book review in the New York Times, Sarah Boxer wrote (regarding the plagiarism allegations): "Mr. Pollak gives a damning passage-for-passage comparison of the two [Bettelheim's book and Heuscher's earlier book]."

Richard Pollak's biography, The Creation of Dr. B, portrays Bettelheim as an anti-Semite even though he was raised in a secular Jewish household, and asserts that Bettelheim criticized in others the same cowardice he himself had displayed in the concentration camps.

Pollak's biography also states that two women reported that Bettelheim had fondled their breasts and those of other female students at the school while he was ostensibly apologizing to each for beating her.

A number of reviewers criticized Pollak's writing style, commenting that his book was motivated by "Vengeance, not malice" or that his book was "curiously unnuanced", but they still largely agreed with his conclusions.