- Genre:biography & autobiography
- Sub-genre:Social Scientists & Psychologists
- Language:English
- Pages:456
- eBook ISBN:9781483530154

See inside
Book details
Also available at
Overview
The Creation of Dr. B, Richard Pollak's riveting biography of Bruno Bettelheim, reveals the world-renowned child psychologist as a dogmatic tyrant and compulsive liar who often terrorized his young patients and their parents, plagiarized his prize-winning work, made false claims about his concentration camp experiences, and grandly invented his own past.
Description
For three decades, Bruno Bettelheim ran the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children. The Austrian émigré rose to become perhaps the leading expert on treating autistic children, claiming cure rates of 85 percent. He dazzled the media with such numbers, and also by comparing the mothers of autistic children to the Nazi guards in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he had been incarcerated for ten months. Thousands of readers of Bettelheim's books and articles, and watchers of his interviews on television, regarded him as without peer in the psychological realm. But, as Pollak shows conclusively, all the while Bettelheim was leading, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, "a life of lies."