ABSTRACT
Lauretta Bender’s paper was first published in the Handbook of Correctional Psychology in 1947. A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and inventor of the Bender-Gestalt test, Bender reviews the important observations of others concerning the psychopathologies of institutionalized children during World War II. She then offers her own cogent, experience-near observations of children at Bellevue Hospital. The beauty of this work, although she discounts biological contributions, is her insight into the interplay of attachment, identifications, affect, and intellectual development and her understanding of how aberrations in one domain of personality will dynamically change others.
