Bettelheim and Feral Children: Essay Two

If the previous essay ended with B's claim that autistic children generally come from cold families which have just about forced the child into his autism (i.e., autism is a choice based on a response to intolerable circumstances), in the rest of the article he continues on this theme, though adding the theme of "progress" to it. He says:

"During the past years we have cared for at least 19 children at the Orthogenic School whose diagnosis was definitely infantile autism.... if an intelligent and interested layman..had observed most of them during their first year with us..for a period of time comparable to that he (the author of the wolf girl study) spent with Kamala, his description might have been exactly like that he gave of this wolf girl," p. 460.

In other words, you don't have to go to India to learn about these children. Just listen to me, Bruno Bettelheim, tell you about them. Then he gives the typical Bettelheim rosy picture.

"At present, we have 12 such children, ten of whom, for a year or two, showed the same behavior, though most have since advanced much further intellectually."

B knows not only how to diagnose autism, how to explain it historically and literarily, but also, seemingly, to "cure it." Let me conclude by quoting his summary:

"To sum up: Study of the so-called feral children, and comparison of them with known and well-observed wild autistic children, suggests strongly that their behavior is due in large part, if not entirely, to extreme emotional isolation combined with experiences which they interpreted as threatening them with utter destruction. It seems to be the result of some persons' --usually their parents'--inhumanity and not the result, as was assumed, of animals'--particularly wolves'--humanity [Now his literary sense for irony gets the better of him]-- To put it differently, feral children seem to be produced not when wolves behave like mothers but when mothers behave like non-humans. The conclusion tentatively forced on us is that , while there are no feral children, there are some very rare examples of feral mothers, of human beings who become feral to one of their children," p. 467.

Two conclusions, already mentioned, should be evident to us by reading B's article: (1) that autistic children were "progressing" under his care: and (2) that one of the major "causes" of autism was "feral" mothers.

Bruno Bettelheim and Women

But we misunderstand B if we think his attitude to mothers of autistic children meant that women in general at that time didn't think he was wonderful. To put it positively; they adored him. In fact, ever since 1948 he and his editor, Ruth Marquis, had begun recording his weekly conversations with mothers about raising children conducted once a week in the evening at Blaine Hall at the University of Chicago. These edited conversations were published in 1962 as Dialogues with Mothers. He also wrote a column for Ladies Home Journal for a decade on child-rearing tips. The mothers would complain about a number of things, and he would pontificate in their presence. As one participant said, "He was God; we idolized him," (quoted it Pollak, R., The Creation of Dr. B, p. 219). People thought he had a Ph. D. in psychology and art history (he only had written a German dissertation in aesthetics). He became a sort of cult figure where his every word seemed destined to be graven on stone for the future.

Things were no different with his staff (almost all young single females) at the Orthogenic School. Staff meetings would often turn into B's probing of the inner recesses of the young women's minds, often reducing many of his female staff members to tears. Yet, despite this, "most of the tearful young women remained in his thrall" (Pollak, pp. 147-48), "turning the Orthogenic School into something of a harem." He relished the idea of "young, pliable, agreeable, passionate" women bending to his will; he had an intense need to be "unambivalently adored." Indeed, many women who recall that era suggeted that the atmosphere was always exciting and tense, sexually charged. The nicknamed it "the nunnery," because you were "married to Bettelheim but never had sex with him."

Back to Bettelheim and Autism

If B had pulled off a tour de force in his article on feral children, the next issue of American Journal of Sociology helped him further. None other than the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in to talk about the "extraordinarily" interesting article by Bettelheim (volume 65, 1959, pp. 75-76). Then, with all the authority of a world expert on strange and exotic human phenomena, she writes:

"Dr. Bettelheim provides us with the first detailed description which accounts adequately for the wolf children as autistic children who had strayed, probably briefly, into the world..."

But she is clearly taken by B's rather clever conclusion to his article--where he posits a sort of "reversal" of nature by having "feral" mothers caring for autistic children, rather than autistic children being the "feral" creatures... So she concludes,

"So we go the full round, and having attributed too much to the wolf mother, now we attribute too little. Who says that wolves are bad mothers?"

I interpret her last remark to mean--after all the bad mothering that goes on in this world (to cause autism), why do we need to posit a WOLF MOTHER to make a child "feral"? I wonder if she was "put up" to write this letter by Bettelheim or the editors of the publication. In any case, it helped to do two things: stress that Bettelheim must be some kind of wizard in handling these cases and give the impression of further exoticism of autism.

Conclusion

But what B didn't either realize, or what we didn't realize in 1960, was that autism is a tremendously complex phenomenon, the contours of which we are still trying to understand today. To have expected B to have "solved" the phenomenon was really too much--he hadn't even understood it, much less "solved" it. I think ultimately that he had no patience for autism--he definitely didn't have much patience for people in general, and that it probably frustrated him tremendously. In 1959 he was still in the mid-phase of the Ford Foundation grant, and had to make things seem rosier than they were. But, in my mind, he lost interest in autism probably in the early 1960s but felt obliged to publish his book (The Empty Fortress--1967) because of the terms of the grant. So he did. And, rather than leaving the field of autism, which he did shortly thereafter, with humility and questions, he left it with the triumphant report that his kids got better. But it can't be true or, if it was true, someone else should have been able to replicate it.....Thus, I don't find it necessary to do any further work on B. His "Empty Fortress" is really empty of further suggestions on the phenomenon. He was an influential "period piece" in the history of the autism movement, but thankfully, his influece has waned almost completely in the US and, to a growing extent, in Europe.

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