The Creation of Dr. B--Bettelheim at Chicago

When Dr. Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) was awarded $342,500 from the Ford Foundation in June 1956 to conduct a five-year study of autistic children at the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago (which he headed), he was a rising start not only in the new world of autism studies but in the field of child psychology. When the "results" of his study, a book on childhood autism called The Empty Fortress, came out in 1967, he was hailed as a brilliant, understanding analyst who had studied autism "with exhaustive care" and had contributed more than any other person, with the possible exception of Leo Kanner, to clarifying this childhood condition.

These judgments would have been an astonishing thing for anyone who had known him in the late 1930s, when he lived in Vienna, Austria and headed the family lumber business, to hear. But, as Richard Pollak points out in his fascinating 1997 biography of Bettelheim ("B")(The Creation of Dr. B; Simon and Schuster), B had a tremendous ability to re-invent himself in new contexts and to falsify, embellish or ignore his past when it suited him in new occasions. The purpose of this and the next few essays is to tell B's story, focusing especially on the way that his background shaped his work on autism.

Bettelheim Before Chicago

B was born into an upper-middle class Jewish family in fin-de-siecle Austria. For those in the know, such a historical placement, for a person with an intellectual bent, gave him a "running start" equivalent to about a generation's advantage over most other people in the intellectual world of the early 20th century. Vienna claimed leading roles in art, architecture, music, psychology and many other fields at this time, and B seemingly wanted to imbibe it all. After completing secondary school (called Realschule; as far as I can determine, he didn't have a Gymnasium education, which would have focused more on classical languages--I don't believe B ever learned them..), he matriculated to the U of Vienna in 1921, where he studied art history. His father, who had contracted syphilis in 1907, finally succumbed to the disease in 1926, which caused B to withdraw from school to take over the family business--a lumber partnership.

But in the mid-1930s he returned to the university, getting a doctorate in aesthetics and also taking courses in a psychology and philosophy. The German doctorate, as you may know, isn't the same as an American Ph. D. Or, to put it differently the American Ph. D. lies midway between the German doctorate and Habilitationsschrift. So, B got the former but before he could do much with it, the Nazi's took over Austria in the Anschluss. B literally got caught up in the ensuing mess, and ended up spending a total of 10 1/2 months in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938-39. Though this was before the Germans decided on the "Final Solution" [the decision to exterminate Jews and other "undesirables"], Dachau and Buchenwald were still very inhospitable places. He was released from the latter in 1939 and emigrated to the States. With a friend, he drove around the country before ultimately settling in the Chicago area. His two year teaching stint at Rockford College, in the area of psychology, came to an end when allegations of a possible improper relation with a female student surfaced, but the U of Chicago offered him the job as head of the Orthogenic School about that time (1944), and he decided to take the position.

At the Orthogenic School ("School")

We don't use the word "orthogenic" in English these days. It was invented in 1896 to refer to something that "promotes good health." When the Chicago School opened during WWI, the primary focus of its mission was to treat young people with physiological deformities or other similar challenges, even though they employed psychologists and others interested in educational testing or mental disorders. But by the early 1940s, the School had fallen on hard times. B was asked to draw up a plan for what he would do with the school, and he reluctantly did so. Already his enterprising spirit was evident when he demanded of the University Chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, a three-fold increase in the School's budget with no review of programs for five years (Pollak, pp. 132-33). And, so desperate was the University that it granted B his wishes. This move disappointed the chaiman of the art history department, who wanted B to teach in his department.

But it showed B's capability, very early, to know how to "read" an audience, to perceive the vulnerabilities in a person or situation, and to promote himself as the one who could come in and change a situation for the better. This skill would put him in very good stead when he began to run the school.

Conclusion

Pollak notes that when B began his term at the helm of the School (he was director until 1973), he quickly moved to replace almost all the staff with young women, most of whom were recent graduates from college or, alternatively, just off the "farm" and coming to the "Big City." He did hire Dr. Emmy Sylvester, like him a Viennese refugee, to head up the counseling program. But for the next 30 years it was B in charge, usually ruling with iron control, alternatively charming and brutal, generous and domineering, concerned and manipulative. And, as he turned to look at his school in the early 1950s, he saw one area he hadn't done anything on that was beginning to emerge into the consciousness of psychologists--autism.

The next essay shows how his views of autism unfolded.

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