Bruno Bettelheim

A psychologist who fled Austria after being held in Dachau and Buchenwald, and went on to direct a University of Chicago school for children with severe emotional disturbances, arguing that intensive psychoanalytic care rather than drugs or institutionalization could reach them. His writing on autism and child development brought Freudian theory to a wide popular readership and shaped mid-century American ideas about childhood trauma. After his death, former patients and colleagues raised serious, substantiated allegations of abuse at his school, along with questions about his academic credentials and use of others' work — a legacy now weighed against his earlier influence rather than separate from it.