ABSTRACT
In 1967 Bruno Bettelheim published The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, forever affecting the world’s view of autism. Hailed by the popular press, the book showed how Bettelheim effectively treated three children with severe autism at the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School by applying psychoanalytic theory and milieu therapy. Children who had once exhibited bizarre antisocial behavior were, in some cases, completely cured. No one had ever achieved such success with this enigmatic disorder. Although Bettelheim’s book did have its critics, the overflow of praise from Bettelheim’s advocates drowned out the voices of the few detractors. As a result, Bettelheim’s thesis, that the infant’s relationship with her “refrigerator mother” caused autism, soon became the accepted explanation in popular and in some professional circles.1
