Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Another Attempt at Pseudopsychoanalysis, June 29, 2001
The reviewers who praised this book didn't check the facts and neither did the author. In fact, the book is highly inaccurate both in its facts and conclusions. The book merely applies the same pseudopsychoanalysis as the subject applied to his "patients," including me.I was a source for the book and nearly everything in it about me is totally wrong. I shared considerable information with the author following a 1990 article in the Washington Post I wrote detailing Bettelheim's unsupported claims and physical and psychological abuse of his wards. The author promised that I could control anything that appeared in the book about me. But the book came out with all sorts of unsourced untruths about me that the author never bothered to check with me. From the looks of them, I suspect some she made up and some she heard from Bettelheim's defenders who worked at the school and broke their professional code of silence to reveal "information" about a "patient." It evidently never occured to the author that these people may have wanted to smear me to save their own reputations. The author even had the nerve to state as fact how I was feeling, which is amazing because she never asked me. In fact, I never felt the way she said I felt. The book just amounted to the same type of Freudian nonsense I was subject to at Bettleheim's school -- someone else telling you that you don't feel what you feel -- you really feel what I tell you you feel. The book even managed to completely misrepresent what I wrote in the Washington Post. I have been quoted in many publiciations on this and other matters but I have never seen anything so far from the truth. The author didn't like my thesis and couldn't get me on the facts, so she apparently made up her own. Immediately upon the book's publication, I notified the publisher by letter of the book's errors, but the publisher never corrected them in subsequent printings. And no one even had the decency to answer my letter. To this very day, the company continues to sell a book it knows is inaccurate.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
an ideal look at Bettelheim which is totally wrong, February 11, 1999
By A Customer
As a former student at Dr. Bettelheim's school in Chicago, I found this book to be very inadaquate in its description of Dr. Bettelheim. This man did a great deal of harm to the students attending this school and was not the savior which Ms. Sutten would like him to be potrayed as. His methods of treatment can be compared with how the German Nazis treated their concentration camp victims. He did beat the students a great deal and fear was a common, shared, feeling which most of the kids felt towards him. His use of imtimadation towards the children, as well as the staff, was complete. Since Ms. Sutton was not a student at the Orthogenic School, of course she would not know the things that went on there. If Bettelheim was alive today, he would be arrested for child abuse, and this is a fact that Ms. Sutton doesn't want to admit.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Avoiding the issues, October 5, 1997
By A Customer
A fascinating opportunity wasted. Sutton accepts Bettelheim'sown picture of himself entirely at face value, and the book quicklyturns into a lengthy exercise in avoiding the issues. She notes first-hand reports of brutality towards the children in his care only to follow them with psychoanalytic explanations of why it was really for the child's own good that Bettelheim hit them - indeed, Sutton manages at one point to give the impression that hitting a small child for crying was a positively saintly act of altruism on Bettelheim's part. Bettelheim's frauds - such concocting and entirely fictitious CV - are excused as creative exaggerations. Even his faking of his own results is explained away by the ludicrous line: "On a deeper level ... Bettelheim did not cheat". Any critics of Bettelheim's methods, are, it is snidely implied, acting out of their own deep emotional problems. In fact Sutton manages to get through the entire volume, including inordinate praise of Bettelheim's cruel and absurd "The Empty Fortress" (referred to by Leo Kanner as "The Empty Book") without once mentioning that Bettelheim's notorious claim that autism was caused by parents' hatred of their child has been conclusively scientifically discredited. Nor does it seem to concern her that it caused years of suffering for parents told that their child's only hope was to be removed from them completely. Instead, she lauds Bettelheim's "understanding" of autistic children (although high-functioning individuals with autism are usually moved to hysterical laughter or fury by his interpretations) and even his psychoanalytic treatment of autism (although research shows it to be entirely ineffective). Anyone advocating an alternative view of autism is lambasted as cold, uncaring and only interested in neurology, and accused of wanting to train autistic children like animals, which is hardly an unbiased assessment. Given that Bettelheim's reputation was built around his "treatment" of autism, these omissions and distortions are culpable.
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