He is best known for his treatises on Nazi concentration camps: Who is Bruno Bettelheim?

Austrian-born American psychologist. He is best known for his studies of Nazi concentration camps and his work on childhood psychology. Born on August 27, 1903, in Vienna, he received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1938. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, he was sent to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps in Germany. Between 1938 and 1939, he studied the mental states of the prisoners, both as a profession and in order to protect his personality from the destructive atmosphere of the camps. He was released in 1939 and went to the USA to work as a researcher at the Association for Progressive Education at the University of Chicago. He was a lecturer at Rockford College in Illinois between 1942-1944. He was granted US citizenship in 1944. In the same year, he began teaching psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago and was appointed president of the university's Sonia Shankınan Orthogenic School. Here he began to develop his theories on autism by working on the problems of introverted children aged 6-14. Bettelheim, who became an associate professor in 1947 and a professor in 1952, is a member of numerous psychology and psychoanalytic institutions.

Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.

During his two years in Bettelheim, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps, he studied the symptoms and reactions of individuals and masses in situations of extreme tension and presented his views in his article titled "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" published in 1943. In this article, which attracted great attention in a short time, he argued that the purpose of the concentration camps was not only to take revenge on the enemy but also to train young Gestapo candidates who would rule Germany and other countries in these camps but also to establish laboratories to research how to manage people.

According to Bettelheim, Gestapo administrators, who see that the individual can withstand all kinds of pressure and pain as long as he maintains his personality, turn the prisoners into docile masses in these camps, making them childlike creatures dependent on the rulers. As a result of the methods applied, the prisoner in the camp soon loses his personal characteristics and independence and starts to see himself as an insignificant part of a large mass. Although he hates the Gestapo, unable to withstand the endless power of the torturer, he accepts that power and turns his rage on captives like himself. He becomes a child in order to be protected against pain. He tends to compare himself to those who are not childish and not dependent on the Gestapo. Over time, believing in and identifying with the methods of the Gestapo becomes commonplace.

Bettelheim drew on his observations in Nazi concentration camps to form his views on childhood introversion. His investigations of childhood introversion, first described by Leo Kanner in 1943, brought Bettelheim to great fame. Thanks to the definitions brought by scientists such as Kanner, Rimland, and Rutter, the causes of autism, which can be distinguished from other child psychosis and mental retardation, are explained by physiological, neurological, and genetic factors, as well as attributing them to psychological factors. Bettelheim comes first among those who explain childhood autism with a psychological approach.

According to Bettelheim, the hopelessness and reluctance shown by the prisoners in the concentration camps are the same symptoms of introversion. Just as the captives surrender their selves to the Gestapo because they have no effect on their environment, so the child who is pushed and repeatedly felt by his parents falls into deep despair and indifference. His efforts to warn the parents have failed and he has no power to influence anyone but himself. The child feels helpless; helplessness is also frustrating, and painful. It would be useless to point out the pain he was experiencing to those around him because his former efforts had not yielded any results. For this reason, he no longer turns to others, he does not want to have a relationship with the world. On the contrary, he builds an "empty castle" in order to be protected from suffering and prefers to exist in that empty castle. The habitual repetitive movements of certain behaviors of such children and the exact repetition of the words heard do not reflect their efforts to establish relations with the people around them. Just as the family pushes the child, he pushes the external environment with these movements. He builds a rich dream world of his own and lives with it.

Bettelheim also identified the insistent attitude of "everything remains the same" that Kanner, Rutter, and Rimland observed in introverted children, and attributed this to the efforts to protect the empty castle that the child built. These children, who strongly resist sudden change and movement, prefer static environments. Because their parents and other people push them away and cause them pain, they turn their attention to inanimate objects.

According to Bettelheim, parents play the most important role in childhood introversion. Bettelheim's view has been confirmed by other researchers. For example, as early as the 1940s, Kanner observed that the parents of introverted children were cold, insensitive, detail-oriented, introverted intellectuals, and used the phrase "icing of emotions" for them. Other researchers have found that the parents of such children are often unable to relate to people. However, none of these arguments, including Bettelheim's theory, is definitive today. On the other hand, those who attribute autism to genetic, physiological, and neurological causes have not been able to develop effective improvement methods in this regard.

Bettelheim ran a school for the treatment of introverted children at the University of Chicago for many years. According to Bettelheim, unlimited love and respect must be shown to the child who has been hidden in his "empty castle" in order to be able to draw him back into the world. Only in this way will the child gradually begin to trust the people who care for him, make efforts to reconnect with them, and leave his empty castle.

In 1964, Bettelheim, who studied several Kibbutz in Israel, questioned the international validity of the child-rearing methods practiced by the American middle class. With the influence of Erickson's epigenetic theory, which emphasizes the importance of the environment as well as heredity, he argued that every environment develops appropriate behavior patterns in the child and that education should adapt to changing social conditions. Bettelheim, who determined that mental disorders, alcoholism, and drug habits, which are seen in American society and whose number is increasing day by day, are not observed in young people who grow up in Kibbutz, suggested that the education system of Israelis is the most suitable method for that environment. According to Bettelheim, the fact that Israeli youth have a different worldview than the elders who raised them has led to the establishment of very close ties among themselves. Young people show their parents' over-devotion to their religious beliefs, to their Kibbutz beliefs. Most of these young people are objective, logical, unsentimental, and realistic. Since they were not brought up by their parents, they consider it natural for their children to grow up in Kibbutz, and they do not care about the emotional distance that communal education will create between the child and the parents.

Bettelheim also studied hyperactive children and put forward a theory known as "diathesis-stress". According to Bettelheim, the congenital hyperactivity of some children is reinforced by the wrong attitude of the parents. For example, the mother of a child who is sometimes lively and sometimes stagnant by nature may feel restless and angry at the child's volatility. The relationship between mother and child can turn into a war as they want the child to behave and cannot provide it. When the vicious circle caused by the mother's faulty attitude appears and repeats at school, the child acquires an overactive personality.

Bruno Bettelheim Works

Love is Not Enough, 1950, 

Truants from Life, 1954, 

The lnformed Heart, 1960, 

The Empty Fortress, 1967, 

Children of the Dream, 1967.

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The horrible truth about Bruno Bettelheim revealed in letters to the editor

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