Customer Reviews

The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim

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As a former student at Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, I would like to commend Mr. Pollack for a well written and truthful account of Dr. B. He was NOT the "saint" as people would like to have him be. Mr. Pollack's description of Dr. B is totally accurate in every detail. We, the students, as Mr. Pollack did point out, were very intimidated by Dr. B and were often slapped and beaten by him. The Orthogenic School staff, never came to our aid, themselves, as well, being intimadated by this man. I am glad Mr. Pollak wrote this book and only wish others would also expose the fake Dr.B.

A book that obviously comes out of deep passion and painstaking scholarship, written with a cold and disciplined fury. The evidence Pollak uncovers is so shocking as to be practically grotesque. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. Bettelheim blighted the lives of a generation of autistic children (as well as their parents), as well as those of any other children who were unfortunate to fall into his care. Pollak's harshness is never less than scrupulously fair, and is clearly richly merited.

Pollak does a brilliant job of tearing away the deceptions and rationalizations that made Bettelheim's Orthogenic School seem like an outstanding, cutting edge School for emotionally troubled, mentally ill and autistic children.

The chapter on Bettelheim's brutality against the children really made me wonder how did the staff working with him rationalize his behavior for so many years? I guess some staff were intimidated by him. And some were awestruck by his prestige.

I think indirectly Pollak's book is an indictment against the University of Chicago for so carelessly supporting Bettelheim for so many years - 30 years. Pollak shows how Bettelheim was allowed to surround himself with whatever staff he pleased. And frequently, he chose impressionable, young people who had good reason to believe that Bettelheim's method's were rational since the U of C backed the school. I guess the U of C was so content with Bettelheim's national prestige and with the money he brought to the University that they weren't concerned about his cruel, sadistic side. And I'm sure that U of C officials must have known something about this side of Betttelheim, since he said outrageous things in public.

Also, I guess Pollak's book shows how easy it can be for the ordinary person to witness terrible acts of brutality against a vulnerable population (and troubled children, some as young as 4, living away from their parents for several years is probably one of the more vulnerable populations in the world) yet do and say nothing.

In the book, Bettelheim supporters seem to rationalize that because Bettelheim was so brilliant that he could somehow abuse children in an effective, therapeutic way. They decided that his role of the Big Bad Wolf would help sick children overcome the terror of their inner aggression. Now, unless you think mentally ill children are an alien species, what child is going to feel safer knowing that at any moment they might be beaten in the head, slapped repeatedly in the face or have their pants pulled down and be beaten on their behinds with a belt? What child is going to feel safer knowing that all this abuse would be dealt out entirely according to the discretion of one man. And that the staff would either ignore what he did or tell you to overlook the welts he created on your body and just listen to the wisdom of what he said to you. This type of thinking, which Pollak describes in his book, seems like a rationalization of the worst kind. It is extraordinarily simplistic to assume that Bettelheim can help children by beating and shaming them. And Pollak makes it clear that Bettelheim's cruelty towards the children was not an infrequent aberration, but an integral and consistant part of this therapeutic milieu. And, because he is dealing with children, often young children, they cannot stand up to his abuse. They need someone to depend on so much, that they can't resist his tyranny.

And the person Bettelheim picked to be his successor, Jacqui Sanders, never reported his abuse to any authority. And she continued his legacy of hitting children for many years after her directorship. She even wrote a book rationalizing her behavior that was published by the U of C press.

Many who worked at the Orthogenic School, including Jacqui, still rationalize their abusive behavior as superior to restraints or drugs. First of all, I think it's a horrid twist of logic to suggest that beating children is superior to these other methods. Also, at some point in her directorship Jacqui did stop hitting children...I think it's when she finally got licensed as a clinical psychologist. So I guess even she thought of other ways to contain a child who is acting chaotically, possibly when she actually studied the ideas of someone other than Bettelheim. Here's a suggestion for helping a child from me: try finding the child a compassionate therapist. Not a person who witnesses abuse of children and says nothing or a person who is trained to tell a child that getting beaten is okay. But a person who will listen to the child and who will try to help them understand their feelings and behavior.

The sad legacy of the Orthogenic School is that for many years it forced children to accept that getting beaten and shamed was an acceptable form of "care". I personally think that's sick. And I appreciate Pollak for exposing the sadistic underbelly of Bettelheim's School. Many of the students who went there are still alive. Some have families. And some appreciate having a bit of truth exposed to try and understand how the cruelty might have affected us.

Given the facts revealed in this book,the obvious question is,how did Bettelheim dominate the field of Autism for so long?There was an army of people who defended Bettelheim and attacked his critics of the dimensions of Bush and Iraq.One of his critics,a fellow professor at the U of Chicago was assaulted with a baseball bat.
A separate book could be written on the media outlets that artificially inflated every book by Bettelheim.
One lead might be the Ford Foundation giving him almost half a million in the 1950's,at a time when Ford was a CIA conduit and the CIA was involved in mind control experiments that had their focus on sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

Pollak's book is a long-needed, well-written, thoroughly researched document that should be required reading for every psychology and psychiatry student.

Bruno Bettelheim did not blight just one generation of families of autistic people. He hurt, and continues to hurt, hundreds of thousands of people through his misbegotten, arrogantly upheld, cruel, baseless theories that were far more widely publicized than the current scientific research. His book The Empty Fortress (published in 1962 with all the Freudian nonsense) is still in print, which means that there are even today, 2007, many people out there who believe or even revere him.

Rare, indeed, is the family member of an autistic person who has not been assured by a confident Bettelheim reader that the child's mother caused his disease. Can you imagine the harm and heartbreak this causes? Even Bettelheim's own wife quarreled with him because he was so hard on mothers.

Personally I believe that Bettelheim killed himself in part because it was more and more difficult for him to uphold his theories, his life work, in the face of mounting scientific evidence that autism has physical causes.

The Bettelheim defenders have no facts to back them up. They fall back on "he was a brilliant man" or "follow-up studies would have gone against his method" or "he was a distinguished scholar." The facts are that Bettelheim's whole career as a "scholar" was based on lies and misrepresentations; that he hurt dozens of children directly and hundreds of thousands of families indirectly; and that Pollak's book is finally getting people to take a hard look at a very bad man.

The University of Chicago should publicly apologize that it supported him for so long.

In this day and age of widespread , scatter-shot debunking of the public personages , we are often treated to tabloid-style attacks and 'exposes' of the high and mighty. While Bruno Bettelheim hardly ranks up there in widespread public identification with Madonna, George Clooney, Bill Clinton or even an O.J. Simpson, he was a widely known, highly respected figure in the world of academic and layman's psychology. The vast majority of those who were familiar with Bettelheim's works and personna knew almost nothing of the real man, behind the veil of academic journals, newspaper articles, appearances on television and magazine profiles. Those few who truly knew Bettelheim personally sharply divided: those who loved him, blindly(I guess, in the spirit of the Freudian world that Bettelheim was a posseur in, people had 'Transferences' toward him--in the true Freudian sense of the word), and those who knew him, worked with him---and detested him for the reasons sharply outlined in Richard Pollaks' exceedingly well written, ably researched and important book. Very few people 'in the know', it seems, about Bettelheim were neutral about him; he was a polarizing figure. Pollak's book is hardly the stuff of tabloid journalism--nor is it a thoroughly angry, declarative screed by an angry man. Pollak definetely has a point of view--and he marshalls what he believes to be exculpatory evidence for his case. Richard Pollak has aroused the same 'furies' that were ignited when the first Chicago READER letters by former Orthogenic School student appeared soon after Bettelheim's 1990 suicide--the fury and defense of Bettelheim's few remaining apologists. It was to be, for these apologists:Their Bruno, Right of Wrong. Others had a balanced rendering of the full texture of the man--the liar, the braggart, and the hyperbole-laden intellectual terrorist, along with whom they also regarded as the nurturing, humane, emotionally vibrant healer of mothers needing dialogue and the troubled needing balance. No matter what you may or may not know or feel about Bettelheim, dismissal of Pollak's work by the hard-line apologists reminds me of the famous words of a little known die-hard Nixon-defending Indiana Congressman who,when confronted by the final, incriminating tapes that sealed Nixon's adieu, declared: "Hey! Don't confuse me with the facts!" That Congresman was defeated in the next election; and those who will go down fighting to their last defending Bettelheim blindly against all charges will be hard pressed to refute the solid evience woven together by journalist Richard Pollak.

The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim
I read Bruno Bettelheim books when he was the guru of child psychiatry in the 50's and 60's and thought they were excellent. Now this book exposes the truth about him. It is quite interesting and anyone who still believes in his methods should really read it.
Jane Gaschke

this is not biography, but libel with a good motive. For an unbiased overview of the polemic about dr. B. see the review "The Strange Case of Dr. B." in the New York Review of Books, Volume 50, Number 3 ? February 27, 2003. (i found it online)

Mr. Pollak has done families on the autism spectrum and, especially, mothers an enormous service by writing this book. The Bettelheim theory on autism -- that refrigerator moms caused autism in their children by unconsciously rejecting them -- ruled the medical and psychological community for decades. Based on little more than his own unresearched ideas, Bettelheim not only generated this theory, he made it his business to preach it from the popular media pulpit. Due to this, for decades worried mothers who turned to the medical community for help with their children who were slipping away into autism were blamed as being the cause of the disorder, shunned by doctors and nurses, and advised to institutionalize their autistic children so that they could not contaminate them further.

With three children on the autism spectrum in my extended family, I know firsthand the difficulties, guilt, shame, and fear that parent's feel when figuring out how to help their kids with autism. I cannot and do not want to even imagine how destructive and cruel it must have been for mothers of autistic children to be told by the very people they went to for help -- in the medical and psychiatric community -- that they themselves were the cause of their kid's autism. Mr. Pollak has righted some very pervasive and poinsonous wrongs by exposing Bettelheim for the fraud that he was. It is also a cautionary tale that pat, unsubstantiated claims about any psychological theory should be viewed with caution.

Now, could we look at Mr. Freud and all his many theories based on the psyches of middle-class Viennese ladies?

Thanks, Mr. Pollak!

Richard Pollak has done great service by calmly exposing Bruno Bettelheim as a liar, fake and child abuser. In europe there is still a refusal by post-WWII psychiatrists to let the so-called "research" on autism of Bettelheim go where it should, in the trash can of freudian mis-interpretations. Bettelheim destroyed generations of our children and their parents by laying the blame for autism at the children's mothers. I pray forgiveness for his soul.