We look at some of the innovators within the child care field

Bruno Bettelheim

Like so many influential and inspirational people, Bruno Bettelheim was highly thought of during his lifetime. It was only after his suicide in 1990 that people who had known and worked with him came to question his views.

Bettelheim was born in 1903, the son of a lumber merchant. He attended university in his homeland of Austria, but his studies were cut short after his father’s death and he returned to help run the family business.

Ten years later, he did return to studying and gained a degree in philosophy, but it wasn’t until he left the country that he settled on a career as a child psychologist. As a Jew, he spent some time in Nazi-controlled concentration camps, but as this was before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was able to buy his way out.

He headed for the United States and claimed to be a professor of psychology – saying that proof of this had been destroyed by the Nazis. A major part of his working life was spent as director of the Orthogenic School. Based at the University of Chicago, the school provided a home for emotionally disturbed children.

During his sojourn there, he wrote many books on child psychology. He was a Freudian fundamentalist and after his death many of his former peers began to question his work. Some saw him as a brilliant and inspirational mind, others criticised him as cruel.

One of the areas that ultimately made Bettelheim unpopular was his theory on autism.
Despite a wealth of medical evidence to the contrary, he insisted that the condition was caused entirely by cold mothers – he called them refrigerator mothers – and fathers who were rarely around.

He wrote that much of his life had been spent working with children whose mothers hated them. Not surprisingly, this view was taken up by some Freudian analysts who persisted in blaming mothers for autism in children. The view has since been discredited. Sadly, Bettelheim’s earlier work reaching out to disturbed children is now often forgotten because of the outrageousness of his views on autism.

Having suffered from depression throughout his life, Bettelheim killed himself in 1990, some years after his wife’s death from cancer.

Among his works are The Uses of Enchantment and The Empty Fortress.