When Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide in 1990 at the age of 86 he had a towering and broadly based reputation:
as a wise and humane child psychiatrist in whose Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago hundreds of severely disturbed children had been restored to normal life,
as an expert on child - rearing in the Israeli kibbutzim,
as a survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau whose
writings had established him
as an authority on life in the concentration camps, and
as a
specialist in the treatment of autistic children.