Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim (1903 to 1990) was an Austrian-born American scholar and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. Born in Vienna, he took a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1938, was imprisoned in the Dachau and Buchenwald camps for about ten and a half months, and emigrated to the United States in 1939. He became a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and taught at Stanford after 1973. An early writer on autism, he drew on Freudian ideas to argue that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy without psychotropic drugs. After his death, his academic credentials, his treatment of patients and some of his writing were questioned.