Dr. B and Autism Research at the Orthogenic School in Chicago

B's 1956 grant from the Ford Foundation was to study "autism and early ego development" (Pollak, 249). Though he had asked for almost $675,000, the Foundation was skeptical that he had the quality of professional staff in place really to do the work he proposed to do. So it awarded him $342,500. As it was, the grant "ran out" in 1961, but B asked the Foundation for two additional years, with no additional money, to consolidate the results. This was granted. So, the study should have been done in 1963, even though the book, The Empty Fortress, wasn't released until 1967. So his book, which was mostly received to high praise, was more reflective of work done in the late 1950s than in 1967. I say this because the major attack on B and B's philosophy came in 1964 by Bernard Rimland in his book Early Infantile Autism. This could only occur because B had been promoting his "psychogenic" views on autism since the mid-late 1950s.

As far as I can tell, B's view on autism was shaped by four factors: (1) his experience as a concentration camp resident in the late 1930s; (2) the anti-parent, and especially anti-mother views of early child psychologists and the Vienna Freudian community; (3) his reading of the early autism literature, where he noted the gaps on issues of causation; and (4) his temperament--to be an authoritative spokesman or even "guru-type" figure, easily dispensing advice, making analyses and proposing answers to riddles. In addition, as any of us who studied in "Germanically-controlled fields" knows (my Germanic Biblical Studies professor once went through a list of names of how the "field" in the US was "controlled" by Germans in all the leading Eastern Universities, as well as U of Chicago and Claremont), American society in the 1950s and 1960s longed for authorities who would tell us "the truth" about ourselves.

Someone with a Viennese background and a thick German accent, who claimed he was in "Freud's circle" (false), and who spoke in a refined way about art, mythology, philosophy and pscyhology, seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Enter Dr. B. Though the rest might not be history, a great number of things were already determined by these factors.

The Orthogenic School, at the University of Chicago

Pollak goes through, in painstaking detail, in his chapter on "Autism" (The Creation of Dr. B, pp. 249-285) the way that B "fudged" his numbers and conclusions during the autism study. Suffice it to say that he never claimed to have more than a dozen children with autism at the Orthogenic School at any time, but actual referrals of these children only mention that two or three had been diagnosed with autism. This brings up the issue that even though B had surely read the early literature on autism, autism was perceived as a sort of "exotic" diagnosis with a definition that had not fully congealed by the mid-end 1950s. Thus B, who had a flair for exotic myths, fairy tales, Freudian terms and word-play in general, could use the word "autism" in his work from the late 1950s to mean pretty much anything he wanted it to mean.

Pollak provides a few examples of B's "word play" that strike the hearer as little more than strange in 2007. For example, Marcia was one of the children in his autism study. She used to lie in her bed with a large, lightweight ball or balloon touching her mouth. She also played with a bottle that she called "lady," which B contented could be seen "with some imagination" as having breasts (Pollak, 264). B seemingly had a great interest in childhood breast fixations or interests. In any case, Marcia mentioned on one occasion that she wanted to smash the school's circular ceiling lights and then said, "Baby needs breakfast."

Could those cryptic words mean anything? B said that it did, especially when Marcia began to say "break breast" a little later. He then explained:

"Break breast is probably an idea more readily available to a baby fed from a breakable bottle than to one nursed from the breast.."

Now we can begin to see where he is going---towards motherhood. Regarding another young girl, B said that she was like a fawn in the Vienna Woods

"caught eternally between her overwhelming desire for the good breast (the good mother) and her despair because, in spite of all her efforts there seemed nothing there for her, not even a 'bad breast,' but just an empty nothing," (quoted in Pollak, 264).

On another occasion, one of the children, Joey, played a game he called "Connecticut papoose," the papoose being a person (himself) with a glass around him. This Joey, whom I described in another essay, was no longer someone who only had wires around him but was a person, still encased and protected by glass. He was connected and cut off at the same time (hence Connect-i-cut; Pollak, 265).

This kind of fanciful explanation by B reminded me of the kinds of Scriptural explanations given by the Early Christian Fathers of the 3rd century to explain the so-called "Christological" meaning of the Old Testament. I laughed at it in graduate school, and I am amused today.

Conclusion

The "bottom" line for B, however, was that he would report astonishing progress of the autistic children in his care when the Ford Foundation wanted their annual "updates" from him. Those children with autism who had been with him only a year might still have a long way to go, but there were literally dozens (he said 100 on one occasion) of children with autism who had been successfully mainstreamed as a result of his work. So he claimed. No one, however, visited his school to "check out" his results. No one really knew much of anything except the periodic stories which would come out from Mount Chicago. The next essay looks at one of these stories--which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology-the most prestigious sociological journal of the time. So popular was his article in that journal, that it even brought a commendatory letter from none other than Margaret Mead. I tell that story in the next essay.

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