Richard Pollak, the New York-based journalist who has just published a biography of the late Bruno Bettelheim, only met his subject once. Pollak’s “backward” little brother, Stephen, had attended the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School under Bettelheim before falling to his death from a barn loft while the brothers were playing hide-and-seek in 1948. Twenty-one years later, on a mission to learn more about the brother he barely knew, Pollak paid Bettelheim a visit.
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Two more decades passed before Pollak would speak to Bettelheim again, but the initial encounter stayed with him. “I was astonished,” Pollak recalls. “He exhibited a tremendous anger at my parents that baffled me. This man was an internationally renowned healer–why was he so furious? It was a stunning encounter, and it clearly left a deep impression on me.”
What the former Nation editor found was surprising: almost everything on which Bettelheim’s reputation rested was trumped up. His academic credentials, the amount of time he’d spent in concentration camps (which played an important role in his theories about human behavior under stress), the success rate of the Orthogenic School–all falsified. In addition, Pollak found evidence that Bettelheim was a plagiarist, and his interviews turned up three women who say they were fondled by the director while living at the school.
Pollak says he believes that kids at the Orthogenic School did often get better, but he thinks it probably had more to do with the work of specific counselors than with any of Bettelheim’s methods. “If someone was at the school from ages 12 to 16, how do we know that if he had stayed with his parents he mightn’t have gotten better?” he says. “You just don’t know.”
