Bruno Bettelheim at the Orthogenic School

I first met Bruno Bettelheim in person in the summer of 1952. I was 21 and he was 48. I had met him earlier in the pages of a textbook, Readings in Social Psychology, and had cried over his description of the horrors of the concentration camp. My admiration for him was profound: that he had maintained his sanity by observing and trying to understand what was happening to the men around him. This ability of his to speak to both emotion and intellect remained an essential part of him and his writing and, I believe, to some extent explains the strength of people's reaction to him, even today, 20 years after his death. I had also met him on the pages of Love is Not Enough, his book about the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago. He had undertaken its directorship eight years earlier, and in the book described a new approach to severely disturbed children that we called “psychoanalytically oriented milieu therapy.” This book, its subject and its author were to have a significant impact on the field of residential treatment. I was completely taken by the image of an unusually compassionate man, who, with the help of similarly compassionate staff could understand and restore hurt children.

The man that I met on that June day seemed to bear no resemblance to the one I had constructed from his writing. He was not the handsome young doctor in a white coat that I had imagined, but a homely middle-aged man with a bulbous nose, very thick glasses and a paunch. He met me at the door in his shirtsleeves and led me into his office; we couldn't use the living room because it was being redecorated. I had just arrived from Boston, having been hired to work as one of those helpers described in that wonderful book. His manner was more surprising than his appearance. He called in a young staff member and proceeded to discuss my voice. It was too soft and had holes (my hesitancies). He told me that I had to leave off my Radcliff manners-that the only good thing he