Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born self-educated psychoanalyst who spent the bulk of his career from 1944 to 1973, as a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and director of the Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children. He is best known for his essay The Uses of Enchantment , which applied Freudian psychology to fairy tales and won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the 1977 National Book Award in category Contemporary Thought.
As a Jew and an advocate of Austrian independence, Bettelheim was imprisoned in 1938 in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald for ten and a half months. He emigrated to the United States in 1939. Drawing upon his experience, he published a highly regarded paper in 1943 entitled "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" and was appointed as a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago the following year. He suffered from depression for much of his life and committed suicide in 1990.
Bettelheim wrote a number of articles and books on psychology for more than 40 years and had an international reputation on such topics as Sigmund Freud and emotionally disturbed children. However, his theories on autism, for which he blamed parents and primarily mothers in The Empty Fortress , raised controversy in his lifetime and are now considered to be discredited. His death was also followed by several revelations of fake credentials, plagiarism, and student abuse at the Orthogenic School.
The University of Chicago has been criticized for not providing the oversight during Bettelheim's tenure which it normally provided, nor did Chicago-area psychiatrists speak up while having some knowledge of what was happening.
“The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are, they are not…”
Source: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
