Bettelheim and the autism industry

The pathological hatred that the famous "psychoanalyst" Bruno Bettelheim shows to have towards the generality of parents from his first publications in 1943 until his suicide in 1990, without a doubt, he determined that during almost three decades, thousands of mothers of children with autism were blamed for what happened to their children first and separated from them later. The truth is that since we have little information about his biography, we do not know exactly the date, origin and reasons. for which Bettelheim developed that sick hatred that he openly manifests in each and every one of his works and that in turn, served as the basis for asserting himself in authority and directing without any questioning or opposition what would later become a huge deal. In fact, after his arrival in the United States in 1939, he himself was in charge of reinventing it with a large number of data false that would be discovered almost forty years later thanks to the investigation carried out by the journalist Richard Pollack. But this is not a biography, but rather, a questioning of those data that already reinvented, reconstructed, would be useful to Bettelheim to carry out his dreams of glory.

Index

1. Biography of Bettelheim
2. Research
3. Origin of the
4. Bettelheim studies and influences
5. Compare mothers of autistic children to SS guards

Until the publication of "The Creation of Dr B", few authors have given us - like Pollack - a slight idea of ​​the events that happened in Bettelheim's life before he emigrated and that could be the trigger for what remains a unknown. However, we know that both his "ugliness" and the syphilis suffered by his father and that Bruno did not discover until adolescence, two important issues that did not prevent over the years from projecting internally his promising dreams of dedicating to the study of philosophy, psychology and artIt was not until the death of his father that he had to leave them definitively and forcibly to dedicate himself exclusively to the family business.

Bettelheim was very clear that everything that he planned could have been carried out without any problem if it were not perhaps... Because of the coldness and indifference of his mother that somehow led his father to maintain relationships with other women outside of marriage and to contract syphilis, thus disrupting their future. What is evident is that Bettelheim channeled his broken dreams, her frustrations and dissatisfactions to the figure of his mother. The possibility of seeing himself with the mental image that he had been projecting since his childhood and adolescence as the great philosopher or psychologist it would valued for his intellect, due to the intellectual capacity that would end up overcoming his complexes and the rejection of which he always believed himself to be an object and which he undoubtedly attributed to his ugliness, suddenly he fell to pieces to assume- even against his wishes - to be a simple "merchant" in an annexed Vienna and in which he felt despised not only for being Jewish, but also for not belonging to the intellectual elite bean.

Undoubtedly, it is probable that Bettelheim found in his mother the perfect culprit of all her ills, the silent responsible discovered in hers. psychoanalysis sessions with the prestigious Richard Sterba, the wicked witch of fairy tales, the SS guard of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau in which he was interned for eleven months, but that single hatred was not enough and from now on, Bettelheim would take advantage of it in his own benefit.

Fervent admirer of Freud, and like this, attributed a psychological origin to neurological disorders, Freudian psychoanalysis was his salvation, after all, he must have found the "causes", "reasons", and "answers" with which start your own autism industry and from there and from the tremendous web of lies that he wove upon his arrival in North America, he increased his authority on the subject and prestige, but also his economy.

In less than five years, the poor Viennese refugee who was barely making ends meet as a teacher became the rich and prestigious Dr Bettelheim, three years later he was appointed director of the Orthogenic school of Sonia Shankman, wrote essays, received awards, and gave lectures.

It was already practicing as a child psychologist at the Orthogenic School of Chicago, when Bettelheim materialized that hatred in his "fridge mothers" theory; assuming, deciding, and publicizing that autistic behaviors were caused by the mothers emotional coldness affected children and most despicable of all, expressing their belief that the precipitating factor of childhood autism was the parents' wish that the child did not exist, but that was not all, in his school, Bettelheim "prescribed, the perectomy, the removal of the parents from the child's life, as a solution to the severely damaged "(Maldonado).

Bettelheim operated the Orthogenic school as a company, once appointed director, he requests a grant to finance a project on childhood autism, starting from then, the school is not only financed by the University of Chicago but also becomes sponsored by the Ford Foundation, an organization created in 1936 by Edsel Ford to to finance programs that promote science, education and human development and that grants him the amount of one million three hundred thousand dollars after his advisory commission on mental health reported his absolute confidence that without Bettelheim's intervention, autistic children would starve or end up in institutional confinement mental. The number of children admitted to school never exceeded fifty and according to Bettelheim's version they came from wealthy families who could pay for all or part of the treatments and the rest were left in charge of the powers that be public.

Quoting Goldberg in his review of Blaming the Victim, "Bettelheim always needed someone to blame, the victims more The vulnerable mothers he had on hand at the time were the grieving mothers who asked him for help and whom he pointed to as the cause of autism in their children. children. Bettelheim falsely claimed having discovered the etiology of autism in the refrigerator mothers and in psychoanalysis he cured her and lied to the Ford Foundation, sponsor of the school that he himself directed, claiming to have cured 85% of children with autism ".

I am surprised and concerned that even today, different research articles on the life and work of Bruno Bettelheim continue to be published in prestigious magazines of neuropsychiatry attributing to it a pioneering work in the treatment of autism, such is the case of Catherine Dreyfuss, who assures that "Until the research of Bettelheim were considered incurable, but he managed to return many of them to ordinary life by starting an optimistic thought, attentive to the particular, patient and respectful.". I suppose that on the one hand and despite the fact that the most recent studies show it, Dreyfuss continues to ignore that autism is a chronic disorder that lasts throughout the life of the affected person, that is, it has no cure, and on the other, that the research carried out by Pollack reveals not only that while Bettelheim lived in Vienna, he had no experience treating children with autism, but also that many of the boarding children at the Chicago Orthogenic school had severe emotional disturbances and many others did not, meaning that a good number of the children at those that Bettelheim claimed to have cured were not exactly autistic, although he said otherwise with the sole purpose of definitively ensuring the success.

This is the case of "Patsy", the daughter of a wealthy American whom Bettelheim and his wife Gina take in at their home in Vienna for seven years. At present, no one knows that it was Gina and not Bruno who was exclusively in charge of taking care of the girl while her mother traveled of her for the old Europe, however, it is Bettelheim who takes credit for "having achieved progress that exceeded all anticipated thanks to the effectiveness of providing the girl with a totally therapeutic environment ", in other words, Bettelheim claimed the miracle and thanks to your therapy and the application of psychoanalysis, "Patsy" was cured, a fact that contradicts the investigation of Pollack, who in order to carry it out, interviewed Patsy, the same that she confirmed that she was not autistic and that she had never been, that is, that Bettelheim could not "cure" her autism since it never existed.

However, its existence depended on Bettelheim ensuring a nonexistent experience in the treatment of autism. It is precisely to Patsy's mother and not Eleanor Roosevelt that Bettelheim owes his release Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps as well as her subsequent trip to the United States. United. I wonder now, what would Patsy's mother think when she, after saving her life, had knowledge of her cruel theories that ultimately, she too pointed the accusing finger at her as an SS or a wicked witch or simply as an emotionally disaffected mother whose failure turned her daughter into autistic?

Either way, Bettelheim had the battle won and in this respect he would have said; What kind of mother leaves her daughter in the hands of others for seven years in a row? Just one disaffected mother, just a mother who has no feelings for her daughter.

The same Pollack research mentions a former teacher at this school who remembers Bettelheim telling her: "We need to develop some credibility in the community, and the way to do it is to show some success ", the truth is that one way or another and using falsehoods, got.

But going back to the notorious "mother refrigerator" theory, no one who knows the subject of autism ignores that this had been postulated by the Austrian psychiatrist and resident in North America, Leo Kanner in 1943, when he published his study "Autistic Affective Contact Disorders" and he stated that autism was a disorder of emotional origin that appeared as a consequence of rejection or emotional coldness of mothers of affected children: "Another fact stands out prominently. In the whole group, there are very few really warm fathers and mothers, even some of the happiest marriages are often cold and formalistic in their relationships... the question arises as to whether this fact has contributed to the condition of children, or to what extent they have done so. "Despite his assertion, Kanner suggests timidly that: "The loneliness of children from birth makes it difficult to attribute the general picture exclusively to the type of early parental relationships with our patients "that is, autism could have a behaviorally expressed biological origin due to severe difficulty in establishing affective ties with other people and that by itself, the emotional coldness of the mother was insufficient for her appearance, in any case, I am convinced that the conclusions of The research carried out by Kanner was completely hasty since it only included the study of the behavior of eleven children of different ages with peculiar behaviors.

However, in 1949, Kanner published in the American journal of orthopsychiatry, his article "Problems of nosology and psychodynamics of early infantile autism" in which he once again links lack of maternal warmth with autism and he compares the mothers of affected children to a "refrigerator." It will be useless if almost thirty years later he published his book "In defense of mothers", in which he dismisses his own theory after finding that siblings of children with autism raised by the same parents had no symptoms Similar.

I have no doubt that appropriating the theory originally advocated by Kanner to popularize it benefited Bettelheim both professionally and economically, since since then it would be considered an authority in the field of autism and hundreds of anguished, desperate parents, but above all, with enough economic capacity to be able to afford the high prices charged by the Orthogenic school, they resorted to him seeking help both for themselves and for their children.

The truth is that the famous "psychoanalyst" was never very original, let's say, in fact, he not only borrowed Kanner's idea, years later he would also "borrow" the postulates that Anna Freud he argued about "identification with the aggressor as a defense mechanism against him", to use it in the essay that he would write and in which he postulated that both Inmates in concentration camps, such as children with autism, identify with their enemies or aggressors as a defense mechanism against them. "loan" brought him substantial benefits in the face of his prestige and authority both on the issue of autism and the veracity he was granted "holocaust survivor Jewish".

Too many years after Kanner retracted dismissing the theory of affective coldness as a cause of autism and Bernard Rimland did it. posed as a genetic disorder, in one of his last interviews with the American psychiatry magazine, Bettelheim stated: "My main detractors are mainly parents of children with autism, unable to recognize their own responsibility, it is much easier to say that it is genetic, that it is all about fatality, of course, these children are particularly sensitive, they reinterpret every gesture of their parents, so feel rejected and choose to take refuge in isolation total. A less sensitive child in the same circumstances might have become neurotic, delinquent, or rebellious. The important thing is to help children, the supporters of the genetic theory are unable to do so. "

There is no effective test to certify that Bruno Bettelheim studied psychology, far from it - and despite his well-known admiration for the father of psychoanalysis - for having been a disciple of Freud during the time he lived in Vienna. If we consider that Sigmmund Freud lived in Vienna from 1860 to 1938 at his home on Bergasse 19 in the city center and supposedly belonging to the same guild intellectual that Bettelheim, it should not seem strange to us that at some point in their respective careers and despite the difference in age, they had made contact, but it was not So. None of the Viennese refugees who in those times and like Bruno did, emigrated to America, testifies or confirms "that friendship", not even They remember having read some of his "His books" or having met him when "supposedly" and for fourteen years he held a chair at the University of Vienna .

Pollack's investigation also reveals that Bettelheim reinvented his biography in many other ways. But what reasons did Bettelheim have for doing so? I am convinced that, on the one hand, many of these reasons had to do with reconstructing in the reality of a new country a self portrait of himself with which he had fantasized over the years and which he believed had the right to vindicate, on the other hand, only that self-portrait riddled with falsehoods, corrected and exaggerated to obscenity would depend on the key to his success and prestige. He needed reinvent yourself to be someone, to have credibility, to access the intellectual circles that he had dreamed of so much, it was then that he completely erased the past of him as a simple worker in the family business and only rescued from this the episodes that would later be used to carry out His objectives, that is, the existence of Patsy, of which we have already spoken and the passage of her through the concentration camps of Buchenwald and D achau. America gave him the best of opportunities; the ugly duckling could finally transform into a swan and that was something Bettelheim was not willing to give up.

In 1943 Bettelheim writes "Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations", an essay that would not become famous until 1945 when the world became aware of the fate of six million Jews in the death camps of Nazi Germany and which was later included by Bettelheim in his famous work "The empty fortress", although with a variation, since the writing at first served as the basis for the that he would later write stating unceremoniously that the behavior of children with autism is quite similar to that experienced by inmates in camps. concentration; "To reconstruct or speculate how autistic children experience the world, I can state that in the same way that concentration camp prisoners perceived the world in which they lived."

However, Bettelheim is not satisfied with it and it is then that he resorts to a despicable comparison; to ensure that the behavior of mothers of children with autism is the same as that of the SS guards.

The analysis that Bettelheim makes in this regard begins with the description of the so-called prisoners "moslems" to those that other prisoners called this way, since they had resigned themselves to die as the SS wished, accepting death without showing any kind of opposition, without fighting to survive and identifying with his enemy. For Bettelheim, the "moslems" allowed the SS to take possession of them psychologically and emotionally, since they internalized their desires transforming their inner reality in correspondence with the outer one having a vision of themselves and the world similar to that of children with autism.

In conclusion, for Bettelheim, the "moslems" internalized the desire of the SS that they should not live in the same way as autistic children internalize their parents' wish that they do not exist.

No one questioned his proposals, in fact those proposals soon and as Bettelheim published many other essays, became true facts magnificently exposed by a "disciple" of Freud. This is how "Joey the Mechanic Boy" caught the attention of the entire medical community who outright supported the "fridge mother" theory. Bettelheim exposed that Joey had been robbed of his humanity and that he became a machine due to parental rejection sometimes combined with love, describes a mother that she let Joey cry for hours when she was hungry and whose concern was focused on herself, that is, Joey did not wake up any feeling. As a consequence, Joey created imaginary machines to direct his body and mind from him since he was too painful to be human.

Bettelheim's opinion always focuses on parents, it is them that he analyzes making subjective judgments of which he does not provide any other proof than his own opinion based on a simple interview that is possible misrepresented at will of him, it is them who blame for having made a Joey machine, a machine that was not developed or related because they did not contribute any feeling. In his essay, the detailed description describing autistic behavior, such as swinging, is not appreciated. body, poor eye contact, mental rigidity, fear of certain sounds, echolalia, pronoun inversion, etc. After reading it carefully, I consider that Dr Bettelheim would not have passed from being a nobody had he not had the support that he unfortunately obtained from the medical community of the time, who conferred the category of great authority on the subject of autism for more than thirty years, in fact, it was not until 1967 that Bettelheim publishes "The empty fortress", a treatise with which he continues to bring to the world his invented "experience" in treating autistic children who, in his own words, "have withdrawn from the world due to anxiety and the pain caused by the negative feelings of their mothers, these for their part, either out of frustration or also because of anxiety, respond not with kindness but rather with anger or willful indifference, which creates a new anxiety in the child added to the feeling that the world (represented by the mother) not only causes distress, but also anger or indifference".

In this treatise Bettelheim describes the case of several children, the first of them is Laurie, nonverbal autistic, focusing, how could it be otherwise, on her parents: he describes the mother as narcissistic, the father without any interest in Laurie since she is convinced that she is irreversibly damaged and concludes that the problem is with the mother or both fathers.

Next, he cites the case of Marcia, whose mother had a difficult childhood as she had to take care of her family and she resented being a woman, she gets married, but she does not love her father. Both parents wished Marcia didn't exist, but for different reasons. The father to get more from the mother, and the mother to be free of both. As a consequence of all these negative feelings, Marcia perceives the signals of the wishes of her two parents; that she is not there and decides to live a life of non-existence, that is, that Marcia decides to live to get revenge on her parents.

One of the cases that most caught my attention was that of Martha, As an introduction to this, Bettelheim cites - anticipating his own ideas - Ekstein and Wallesten, who in a discussion of psychotic children recall the story of Hansel and Gretel who illustrate how "the nasty mother" transforms into the mind of a child causing him to develop a paranoid vision of the mother as a devouring witch. In this regard, Bettelheim emphasizes that the destructive figure of the devouring mother or witch is the creation of the imagination. of the child, but in turn this same imagination actually derives given the destructive attempts of the person from the mother.

Now, we must ask ourselves: How did Bettelheim arrive at that conclusion? The truth is that we do not know because in addition to his own opinions, his essays do not provide any objective evidence that shows that the mother of Joey, Laurie, Marcia or Martha were alienated, or were mentally disturbed, had negative feelings towards her children or wished they were not born, he did not provide effective evidence that could demonstrate that those same mothers had a previous psychiatric diagnosis of each and every one of the pathologies that he appreciated in them and did not contribute them simply because those diagnoses did not exist. Bettelheim limited himself to interpreting his way, the way he wanted the "psyche" of those parents trying to find answers based solely on their particular "psychoanalysis", but in what way did he psychoanalyze them?, with one or two interviews after which he accused them of being the cause of the autism of his children and advised their admission to the Orthogenic school in Chicago, which already in the sixties paid eight thousand dollars for boy?

In his magnificent research "The Creation of Dr B", Richard Pollack she says that he had always thought that her mother was exaggerating when she said that Dr. Bettelheim hated all parents, however, her opinion changed after her first encounter with Bettelheim (Pollack had arranged this interview to gain a broader understanding of his autistic brother Stephen-intern at the Chicago Orthogenic school throughout five years) he was absolutely stunned by the cruelty and disdain with which he referred to her mother, assuring "That the cause of the problems was that she behaved like a Jewish mother. "

But going back to Martha's case, what Bettelheim does describe for us are the antecedents of her parents, such as the circumstance that before Martha was born her mother was depressed, she then she had a daughter who was born and developed normally, later she had an abortion, she must have been operated on and her life got complicated, she was advised not to have any more children, but ignoring her, she became pregnant with Martha. The mother-daughter relationship became more difficult than at the beginning and the father decided to choose between his wife and his second daughter since he was totally convinced that continuing to live together one of the two would end in a psychiatric. Finally, the father decided in favor of his wife; Martha should not live, the father thought that Martha destroyed her mother and Martha, who perceived the attitude of her father decided to live as a non-verbal autistic. Bettelheim then states that after several years of devoted care, Martha revealed to her counselor the belief that her mother wanted to put her in an oven and then eat her. He compared her to "Gretel" and concluded that Martha's terror, anxiety and autism were her own creation, that is, terror was the way she Martha visualized and explained to herself the feelings her mother had towards her and autism was a spontaneous response that arose as defending. Here is the good use that Dr Bettelheim returns to give to a "loan" of other people's ideas, in this case, it is the postulate of Anna Freud about the "identification of the victim with the aggressor as a self-defense mechanism" which he brings to the fore through "The empty fortress and birth of the self ".

Bettelheim's lies, the precise data of the biography that he himself reinvented, his megalomania, his fervent admiration for Freud and psychoanalysis, his vulgar lack of originality, the vital need for him to stop being an ugly duckling to transform into a beautiful swan, even the hatred that he could feel throughout his life I would not care about his parents if it were not for the fact that all these factors were fatally combined with the collusion of those who supported him, those who acclaimed him, of those who were looking for an easy answer that was at hand and that Bettelheim somehow provided them, resulting in unique guilty; the mothers. Not even the sensible arrival of Rimland the panorama of autism was able to stop them, the machinery was in motion and it would take forty years for someone to say: "They are not refrigerator mothers, they are not the evil witches of the The fairy tales that gave a fraud like Bettelheim so much fame and prestige are not Gestapo guards who enjoyed humiliating and torturing thousands of men, women, and men. children by the sole circumstance of being Jewish, they are not emotionally disaffected nor do their gestures induce their autistic children to retreat into an empty fortress as the only alternative to a life devoid of affection, they are not guilty of the frustrations and dissatisfactions of a despicable being who took advantage of his own cruelty to set up the industry of the autism.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Bettelheim and the autism industry, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.

• Bettelheim, living and dying, David James Fisher.
• Blaming The Victim. Helene Goldberg.
• The creation of Dr B, Richard Pollack, Simon & Schuster 1997-- In the case of Bruno Bettelheim, Molly Finn, First things, June 1997-- Defending Bruno Bettelheim. Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders reply by Robert Gotlieb. The New York review of Books.
• Souvenir of Bruno Bettelheim. Catherine Dreyfuss, rev. Asc. Esp, Neuropsiq, 2006, vol XXVI, nº98.
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• The swan of autism, Eliana Pérezegaña, Ilustrados.com
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• Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations. Bruno Bettelheim, social psychology 1943, XXXVIII, 415-452
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