Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim (German: [ˈbɛtl̩haɪm]; August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University. Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Some of his work was questioned after his death regarding academic credentials, patient abuse, and plagiarism, arising from a negligence of institutional oversight and pursuing work outside of the psychological community.