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Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (114)	11/26/2002 12:47:56 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 603

Arthur Allen, The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory nytimes.com [ Just for the record, in the you-might-be-interested department, an article from a couple weeks ago. Personally, I'm a little skeptical. Mercury poisoning is not exactly an unstudied phenomenon. A vaguely related contrasting bit: ] 'Rising to the Light': Defending Dr. B. nytimes.com No one falls harder than a hero, and Bruno Bettelheim fell harder than most. Before his suicide in 1990, Bettelheim was considered close to a secular saint: a gentle sage who courageously synthesized what he had learned as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and spearheaded a revolution in child psychology. His belief that bad mothering caused autism might have been outmoded, but he himself was still widely considered a genius, a compassionate philosopher of survival. Advertisement Yet within weeks of his death, scandal crashed in. Patients at his Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago came forward with claims that far from being gentle, Bettelheim slapped and abused his charges. His most influential book, ''The Uses of Enchantment,'' a study of the therapeutic power of fairy tales, was said to be marred by plagiarism. And seven years later, a truly devastating biography was published: ''The Creation of Dr. B,'' by Richard Pollak, whose brother had been a patient of Bettelheim's. The notoriously private psychoanalyst had refused to be interviewed, but Pollak worked for years tracing his history. His conclusion was that Bettelheim was not just a bully but an inveterate liar who faked his academic career, his concentration camp experiences and the evidence for his school's success.