Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna where he studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna earning a Ph.D. Following the Anschluss, Bettelheim was arrested and sent to Dachau and then to Buchenwald concentration camps, in 1938. He was released a year later at the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman and was permitted to emigrate to the USA.
In the USA, Bettelheim he worked with the Progressive Education Association at the University of Chicago, from 1939 to 1941, and then he was associate professor of psychology at Rockford College in Illinois, from 1942 to 1944. Subsequently he became principal of the University of Chicago’s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, an institution for children with severe emotional disorders. His internment in concentration camps led him to write Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (Oct. 1943). The article, studying reactions of inmates to life in the concentration camps, was made required reading for U.S. military government officials stationed in Europe. From 1944 to 1947, he was assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Chicago, from 1947 associate professor and he became a full professor in 1952.
Bettelheim became a world authority in the treatment of severely emotionally disturbed children. He has written prolifically on the subject. In 1950, together with Morris Janowitz, he published Dynamics of Prejudice. His major works include Love is Not Enough (1950); Truants from Life (1955); In The Informed Heart (N.Y., 1960). Bettelheim expanded and modified significantly his psychological observations on the behavior of concentration camps inmates from a psychoanalytic point of view. He judged the Jewish masses who did not revolt against the Nazi terror. In 1967 he published The Empty Fortress and in 1969 The Children of The Dream, an analysis of the rearing of kibbutz children in Israel.
In 1963 he was distinguished for his service as professor of education, and as professor of psychology and psychiatry.
Bettelheim was Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1971-1972); American Psychologists Association, and American Orthopsychiatric Association. He was a member of Chicago Psychiatrist Society, American Philosophers Society, and Chicago Council on Child Psychology.
Bettelheim received a Honorary D.H.L. (Docteur of Hebrew Letters) from Cornell University, and the National Book Critics Award for The Uses of Enchantment and The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (N.Y. 1976).