Buy used: $6.20

FREE delivery May 31 - June 6. Details

Or fastest delivery May 24 - 26. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Authors

Richard Pollak

The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim Paperback – April 6, 1998

by Richard Pollak (Author)

3.9 30 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$6.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$11.83

$14.50

$4.00

Paperback

"Please retry"

$6.20

—

$2.22

Kindle
$6.99 Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$11.83

38 Used from $4.00 2 New from $14.50 11 Collectible from $7.99
Paperback
$6.20

13 Used from $2.22

A candid portrait of Bruno Bettelheim charges that most of the influential psychotherapist's life was marked by deception, faked credentials, exaggerated data, abuse of the children in his care, plagiarism, and a success rate with patients lower than the therapist reported. 25,000 first printing.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Touchstone
Publication date

April 6, 1998
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.2 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0684846403
ISBN-13

978-0684846408
See all details

Nina Sutton
3
Hardcover
6 offers from $12.79

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Touchstone; First Paper ed edition (April 6, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0684846403
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684846408
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.39 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,510,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,367 in Psychologist Biographies
- #18,247 in Medical General Psychology
- #25,539 in United States Biographies

Customer Reviews:
3.9 30 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Richard Pollak
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Richard Pollak's most recent book is After the Barn: A Brother's Memoir. His previous books include The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim; The Colombo Bay, an account of his five-week voyage on a container ship after the 9/11 terror attacks; Up Against Apartheid: The Role and the Plight of the Press in South Africa, and The Episode, a novel that deals with epilepsy. From 1979 to 2014, he served as executive editor, literary editor and contributing editor of The Nation magazine. He has written for that weekly, and for Harper's, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review and other major magazines, and he co-founded and edited [More] magazine, the monthly journalism review that published in the 1970s. He was an associate editor at Newsweek, a political reporter at The Evening Sun in Baltimore, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University, where he created and taught a course in "The Politics of Journalism," which he also taught for several years at New York University. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, the pianist Diane Walsh.
See more on the author's page
Richard Pollak
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

30 global ratings

5 star		44%
4 star		28%
3 star		11%
2 star		9%
1 star		9%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jane E. Gaschke

A Poseur Exposed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 9, 2008

Verified Purchase

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

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Caitlin St John

A fascinating expose of the life of Bruno Bettelheim

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2017

Verified Purchase

The author describes the life and work of his subject in great and enthralling detail. I had read only one of Bettelheim's books, The uses of enchantment, and probably won't pursue any other titles because of the level of plagiarism described by the author. The supporting footnotes convinced me of the author's veracity.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

erich goode

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

A fine-grained biography of a complex, charismatic, and difficult figure.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Michel Olson

you must really love to find out about Bettelheim's life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 16, 2014

Verified Purchase

Too many details in this bio, it could have been edited to the basic facts. Bettelheims books may have been written by a phony but his books are grand.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Mary Mekko

Holy fake experts with German accents, Batman! Another Viennese con man!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 24, 2013

Bruno Buttelheim was an awkward Viennese Jewish child born to a wealthy father who owned a sawmill. He grew up very comfortably in the years before the Anschluss yet was enraged that at age 23 he was forced to give up his aesthetic studies at university to take over the business. His father had died of a long decline with syphilis resulting from contacts with street women. It was often said that Hitler had it as well, but I digress.

Bruno was cursed with ugly features and bad luck with the ladies but he did manage to get a lady marry him. They lived together while he worked and they lived well until he became obsessed with further studies. He wanted the academic life and the prestige that diplomas brought to his friends. Then came political turmoil and finally nazi takeover. Bruno was ultimately arrested and spent time in Dachau. He was able to buy his way out.

Then came life in USA. At the time Bruno arrived, difficult children often mentally ill or autistic, were put in homes when parents could not handle them. Due to Bruno's own upbringing and difficulties with women he readily blamed the mothers for producing these autistics. He called them "refrigerator mothers" and his ideas were widely accepted. His published books sold very well and the Merican public believed he was a qualified psychologist and psychoanalyst, a true Freudian.

The book was written by Richard Pollak, whose own brother had been put in the Chicago home run by Buttelheim. Pollak was so shocked at the dismissal of his brothers accidental death, saying that autistic children tend to commit suicide away from organized care, that he went on a one-man mission to expose the cruelty and fraud of this Viennese schemer. It reads like a story of Elmer Gantry fooling all of the people all of the time. The book caught my eye since I could rember his name from my abnormal psych class in1978 in San Francisco. To think that so many of these immigrants had so many American experts and hapless parents fooled!

You have to admire the chutzpah of these academic con men who liked to blame mothers on general and Jewish ones in particular. He even coulda me himself an expert on mass delusion ideas based on his time on Dachau concentration camp. Bravo or Holy horror batman! The people duped yet again by a strong foreign German accent and big long words!

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Crochet Lover

How to Single-Handedly Set Back Autism Research for Decades

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 30, 2012

I read The Creation of Dr. B several years ago... recently, while going through some storage boxes, I found my copy and had memories come back about what I read. I still have chills go down my spine when I remember reading about not only what an abusive monster and a fraud he was, but thinking about how much he must have set back progress in autism research, and all because he knew exactly who to deceive and how for his own gain.

I already knew Bettelheim's theory about refrigerator mothers was hooey when my oldest was diagnosed with autism during the mid-90s, well after Kanner and Rimland had busted Bettelheim's myths. I had heard of autism years before thanks to my mother's nursing background and experience, as well as a family friend who had a son on the spectrum. The impression I came away with was that autism was not a condition to be feared, it just was what it was, and certainly nobody was blamed for causing it.

So when my oldest got the diagnosis, I felt no false guilt or shame. I simply thought, okay, what's next, what do we do to help?

I was fortunate I came from a generation that didn't have to live with mothers being blamed and having their children taken away from them to place in an institution "for the child's good." That was the world Bruno Bettelheim created for countless parents, and he did so based on lies about his past, his credentials, and his curriculum vitae. The result was children who got institutionalized without cause and families ripped apart. Bettelheim was truly a destructive man in every sense of the word.

Bettelheim never had a psychology degree, it was in philosophy, specifically aesthetics. He wrote academic papers about artwork, not the human mind. His work required him to study psychology *a little bit*, but again, that was not his major. It made as much sense for him to consider himself an expert in psychology as it would for an engineering major with a minor in business law to hang out a shingle with the claim they can help someone facing a libel suit.

Bettelheim essentially built an empire for himself based on lies. He charmed the right people into giving him what he wanted - power and control through being a professor at the University of Chicago and eventually becoming the director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School. Many of his former patients have come forward since his death to give testimony that he abused them severely.

A good percentage of his patients have also stated in the years since they were under his "care" that his imposing a diagnosis of autism on them was, in fact, inaccurate, and they were never autistic. It almost seems if someone sneezed the wrong way by Bettelheim's standards, they had autism. One could infer based on his misdiagnosing so many that it reflected not only how little he really knew about autism, but fabricated what he did say he knew. That he reacted almost violently to Rimland and Kanner's research dispelling his claims about autism not being organic/biological in nature and blasting the refrigerator mother theory out of the water also lends to his lack of credibility.

I am no psychologist, not even close to being an expert. But from my own rudimentary poking around, my guess is if Bettelheim came upon the psychology scene these days, he'd be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and laughed out the door with a permanent Kick Me sign on his back, never to be seen again.

It's a shame he took advantage of the fact that people were more trusting of someone's word as sole source of credibility 50 years ago. It meant he was given a level of authority he didn't deserve or earn, used it to abuse and intimidate innocent children, and set back what we know about autism by decades because he imposed so much authority, that up until the 1970s-1980s, nobody bothered or dared to question him, or if they did, they were quickly discredited and silenced.

Sadly, certain experts and cultures still try to purport the refrigerator mother theory. Various countries in Europe and Asia maintain that autism is the parents' fault. Child abuse expert Alice Miller publicly maintained up to her death that, in her opinion, autism is a result of poor parenting. All of this flies in the face of scientific research that continues to come out stating autism is a combination of factors that are biological and/or genetic in nature, not psychological.

This points to just how damaging Bruno Bettelheim's work has been to autism research and to those in the autism community. Many of us not only have autism, but have children on the spectrum. We can attest neither we nor our children are the result of bad parenting. Even when some of us truly do/did have bad parents, we still don't blame them for having autism, which is for all intents and purposes different brain wiring. No more, no less. To imply that parenting is at fault for who we are is nonsensical.

For that reason I think it's still very relevant to still recommend Pollak's biography in this day and age. The autism community needs to continue ensuring Bettelheim's name is only associated with that of a fool any time someone tries to state otherwise. Those who still believe the refrigerator mother theory may be more and more in the minority, but it's surprising to me in the 21st century that anyone believes it at all or thinks Bettelheim was a credentialed or believable expert in the field.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

A. R. Morris

H.A.R.P - Great Read - 3 Years After Purchasing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 4, 2019

Verified Purchase

A really good and interesting read. Anybody interested in medical history may enjoy this one but certainly people interested in autism history. Perhaps a tad bit of a bias account but still well worth the source information. Great stuff. - Antony Morris

Moonlit

Eye opener

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 28, 2009

Verified Purchase

This is a very well written and researched biography of someone who was once a real hero in some circles. The author has looked into Bettelheim's past and discovered someone who was self aggrandising and built up an international reputation that is clearly undeserved.

One person found this helpful

Andrea Bellelli

Is the history of someone's life a biography?

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on June 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

Pollak's book is a classic in its own way and reconstructs very accurately Bettelheim's life, pointing out the numerous lies he told about his qualification as a psychoanalyst.
However, I found it quite incomplete. When the subject of a biography is a scientist, or pretends to be one, the most important aspects of his/her life are his ideas, as expressed in the books and articles he/she published, and the scientific evaluation by his/her peers. On these points Pollak's book falls short of its objective: it tells you very little about Bettelheim theories, why these were substantially refused by both the psychoanalytic movement and scientific psychiatry, and why these in the end resulted wrong. The book falls also short to describe the medical controversies in which Bettelheim was involved (especially with many parents he wrongly accused to be responsible for their children mental diseases): Pollak devotes much more pages to describe the controversies in which Bettelheim became involved in relation to his views on the Jewish Holocaust.
In summary: the biography is excellent, read this book if you are interested in knowing the man Bruno Bettelheim; look elsewhere if you are interested in a critical analysis of Bettelheim's (wrong) theories and hypotheses on autism.

One person found this helpful

Arthur

Indispensable pour la connaissance !

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on February 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

L'article reçu est conforme à la description du produit.
Je m'en suis servi et je n'ai eu aucun problème avec.

Bettelheim à fait tellement de mal aux autistes.
Merci pour ce livre ! Merci de montrer au monde le visage des psychanalystes.

Translate review to English

See all reviews

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Follow the Authors

The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim Paperback – April 6, 1998

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product details

Videos

About the authors

Richard Pollak

Richard Pollak

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries