Bruno Bettelheim was once revered in child psychiatry. After his death, a darker story emerged.

By 2007, when the United Nations designated April 2 as World Autism Awareness Day, Bruno Bettelheim had been knocked off his pedestal in the field of child psychiatry. But three decades earlier, he was a popular-culture hero.

Famously known as “Dr. B.”, he made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s movie “Zelig.” His book “Dialogues With Mothers” rivaled in influence those written by the parenting guru Dr. Spock.

But upon on his death in 1990, it became apparent that Bettelheim had pulled off a monumental scientific fraud.

He wasn’t who he claimed to be. He hadn’t rescued children from autism’s grip with compassion. Instead, he had bullied into submission his patients at the Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center at the University of Chicago for emotionally disturbed children, where he was director from 1944 to 1973.

In a 1990 issue of Commentary magazine, Ronald Angres recalled his 12 years in Dr. B’s Orthogenic School:

“Though Bettelheim routinely proclaimed in print and speech that no one should ever use corporal punishment on children,” Angres wrote, “I lived for years in terror of his beatings, in terror of his footsteps in the dorms — in abject, animal terror.”

In the limited contact that patients were allowed with their parents, Angres begged to come home. But his father, a psychiatrist, refused to hear his complaints.

I experienced the blinding power of Bettelheim’s deception. After the Orthogenic School, Angres enrolled in Lake Forest College, where I was a professor.

“Do you know Dr. B hit the children?” Angres asked at our first meeting.

I said I couldn’t believe it. As a student at the University of Chicago, I had hung on every word of a Bettelheim lecture. I was transfixed by his book on fairy tales, “The Uses of Enchantment.” It was obvious he had a gruff, domineering side. But could he have faked his resume and led autism research up a blind alley?

Born in Vienna in 1903, Bettelheim belonged to an affluent Jewish family. His university studies were interrupted by his father’s death, which forced him to take over the family’s lumber business. Some who knew him thought him less a scholar than a rich man’s son.

“He was a playboy riding around Vienna in a red roadster,’” Bertram Cohler, who worked with Bettelheim and briefly headed the Orthopedic School, told the Tribune in 1990.

His University of Vienna transcript suggested Bettelheim’s Ph.D. was in art history and philosophy, but it was never clear. He only took a few psychology courses, but the dean who hired him at the University of Chicago assumed Bettelheim had a second Ph.D. in psychology, until informed to the contrary by a Tribune reporter.

A wealthy American couple came to Vienna seeking help for their apparently autistic daughter. Not finding a psychiatrist willing to take the case, the girl was left in the care of Bettelheim’s wife, Gina. She had worked with Freud’s daughter Anna, who applied her father’s theories to children.

Gina’s experience — which Bettelheim later passed on as his own — became the source of Bettelheim’s interest in milieu therapy, treating patients in a strictly controlled environment.

Gina also induced him to go to a psychiatrist, perhaps because their marriage was failing. The experience was brief, but Bettelheim later suggested that he’d undergone in-depth analysis, the prerequisite for certification as a psychoanalyst.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Bettelheim was deported to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. He found his life’s work behind barbed wire.

He covertly studied his own and other prisoners’ reaction to the beatings, which he later presented in a psychologically insightful paper. In “Individual and Mass Behavior In Extreme Situations,” Bettelheim observed that the concentration camp was the blueprint for Nazi-occupied Europe

“It is the Gestapo’s laboratory where it develops methods for changing free and upright citizens not only into grumbling slaves, but into serfs who in many respects accept their masters’ values.”

Bettelheim got to the University of Chicago with help from the Rockefeller Foundation, which found places for refugee scholars. He was assigned to assist Ralph Tyler, who was evaluating high school art programs.

Then Bettelheim was sent to teach art history at Rockford College. The school also needed someone to teach psychology, so Bettelheim volunteered for that post,

Tyler had administrative responsibility for the Orthogenic School, and needed to find a new director. Parents were upset with the incumbent, and Bettelheim somehow convinced Tyler to appoint him head of one of the few psychiatric facilities for young people. Richard Pollak, the author of “The Creation of Dr. B,” a biography of Bettelheim, believed Bettelheim was driven by a desperate need to be somebody, and that the school provided an outlet for his ambitions.

“There was always a peculiar tradition on the American frontier, that when you were frustrated with your life, you simply pushed on farther West and reinvented yourself,” Pollak wrote.

Pollak’s brother, an Orthogenic School patient, was killed in a car accident. By Bettelheim’s analysis the boy’s death was “a thinly disguised form of suicide in which his parents participated in because of their own inadequacies,” Pollak told the Tribune in 1997.

Bettelheim had borrowed a concept from Leo Kanner, who in the 1940s first described autism as an inability to empathize with others. Kanner, a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, considered the condition was due to inadequate mothering.

Kanner eventually rejected his own theory, but guilt-tripping “refrigerator mothers” was a hallmark of Bettelheim’s career. He rejected the possibility of autism’s origin being organic.

Freudianism was sacred scripture at the Orthogenic School. Counselors had to regularly lie down on Bettelheim’s analytic couch and express their most intimate feelings. Surrendering secrets is the prerequisite to emotional growth, Bettelheim taught. But he didn’t reciprocate.

“Sometimes Dr. B talked about growing up in Vienna, but only to illustrate some concept he was trying to teach you,” recalled Jacquelyn Sanders, one of his successors at the Orthogenic School. “Over the years, he would recount the same incident differently.”

The reason was obvious once Angres and other alums blew the whistle on the grim reality of life in the Orthogenic School’s dormitories. Dr. B was making up his biography, one draft after another. Once that breach was made, verifiable facts replaced the fairy tales he told about himself.

His claims of notable success in treating autism were undercut by Sanders’ revelation of Dr. B’s gatekeeping. The most seriously disturbed children weren’t admitted. In retrospect she wondered how many of those taken in were truly autistic.

By the time Bettelheim retired in 1973, child psychiatry was being realigned with science. Drugs were being developed that reduced attention deficits and hyperactivity. The disorder was renamed the “Autism spectrum,” in recognition of its various manifestations and severity.

School boards created special-education departments where autistic children got therapy without giving up the family life that Dr B.’s approach denied them.

In his final years, Bettelheim was isolated, increasingly forgotten by the profession of which he was the architect. He was estranged from the daughter who had provided him emotional support. Declining health forced him into a nursing home. The depression he intermittently suffered became chronic. He obsessed over how he would be remembered.

On March 13, 1990, he died after swallowing a batch of barbiturates and tying a plastic bag over his head.

Among the revelations that triggered was Roberta Redford’s letter to the editor of Commentary. Orthogenic School counselors had silently witnessed Bettelheim beating her, she wrote.

“I was at a loss to understand this until a friend of mine, a mental-health professional herself, made an important point, namely, that professionals today are required to report to authorities even the slightest suspicion of child abuse, let alone anything as blatant as what Bettelheim committed.”

Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.