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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 618.9289
EAN num: 9780029031407
ISBN number: 0029031400
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 496
Printing Date: September 01, 1972
Publishing house: Free Press
Sale Popularity Level: 451398
Studio: Free Press
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Rated by buyers 
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This is shocking example of pseudo-science and blaming parents for everything. The man was a charlatan!
Rated by buyers 
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Trauma is the cause of autism. Biological/emotional/behavioral trauma. Stress that deforms personality can come from physical pain or cognitive pain or emotional pain. Anyone undertanding the incredible power of placebos in clinical medicine sees the other side of the power of fear in biology. A parent does not need to feel shame that their child has autism but needs to see the reality of the sensitive human mind. A parent must seek the truth even if that means understanding that the parent innocently betrayed the safety that a child needed to feel. Those of you "seeing red" right now, and looking for a specific "smoking guy" ask yourself, "was my sensitive baby kept warm and held tight and safe and sound and comforted and in a quiet and well protected place and kept from noise and loneliness and solitude sufficiently to enable them to escape the stress of birth and early lives?" Were you there with the baby (as all mammalian mothers are, other than 21st century mothers), 22 or more hours a day until the baby was 12 months old? Sounds bizarre? Not if you study the lives of all our mammals/animal genetic cousins. We are frightening our infants to emotional death, more and more and more. You are not to blame, you didn't realize it, you just went to work, got the best "bottle", used unrelated care givers, had your birth in a brightly lit, crystal clean hospital, with you own heart pounding and your own processes mutilated by societies "disease" model of birth. Don't let your unnecessary shame blind you, the child is withdrawn from the world because the world is too much, and the child is too sensitive and was not protected enough. Autism is seen with the males because they are more sensorily sensitive, but more and more little girls are succumbing. It's not your fault, but blaming vaccines and fluoride and whatever... is your fault. This book, no matter what the ad homium arguments are made against the author, is about the truth. I see my happy kids and how each boy was differnent in sensitivity and how two of them needed me physically so close by in order for them to be relaxed, I slept with both until they were a year and a half, and I know the truth when I read it. I heartily recommend buying this 35 year old book, what you hear in 2008 about autism, censored and warped, will be seen pathetically clear in 20 years as the self-protective scramblings of a confused group that was mislead about birth and child rearing and is too fearful to see the truth. No wonder there is always a different explanation for autism. It's hiding in plain site. God bless you and all our children, you parents of autistic kids need love and protection, as much as anyone could possibly need it, as much as you child needed it and needs it now.
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Bettelheim died almost twenty years ago, discouraged because his theories were harder and harder to uphold in the face of mounting scientific evidence against them.
This book is still in print because he had built up a formidable persona as a Dr. Strangelove-type expert on autism. Considering that his experience and training in autism turned out to be largely fabricated, that his former students were terrified of him, and that his self-reported good results were not provable, it is a mystery that he still has a reputation, among those not familiar with autism, as an expert.
Bettelheim was a brilliant writer who comes across in his books as compassionate, but was arrogant and cruel in person. He did immense harm to families of autistic people, and the harm is still happening. Families are still being told today, in 2007, that they caused their child's autism. This is the legacy of "Brutalheim." Note that he had no evidence whatever that his theories were correct; they were obviously correct because they were Freudian! Talk about circular thinking.
This book is part of the long sad history of dangerously harmful pseudo-science.
Rated by buyers -
The Empty Fortress is a brilliantly written, painful look at the after effects of the deepest, most awful trauma the human creature can experience. It seems, from the wildly angry/aggressive reader reviews here on Amazon that it is NOT a good idea to read this book if you are the parent or emotionally invested caregiver of an autistic person. There are many other books on this subject that are wonderfully informative and well-written. However, if you are interested in autism, the concentration camps, the moment when the soul bursts out of nothingness into the world -- in essence really the meaning of life according to a brilliant thoughtful man, this is an amazing book. If you are at all interested in what will happen with the children (and adults) who have suffered but lived through Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia etc this is an amazing and important book. I found Bettleheim completely, but completely, convincing about the causes of autism. If anything it seems like subsequent study has found that he was too hopeful for the future of these poor, suffering children and too resistant to psychopharmaceuticals. But a more human, sympathetic person is hard to imagine. This book reads to me like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Nabakov's non-fiction (and fiction), Doestoyevsky -- right up there with the ranks of the greatest literary writers who explored what it means to suffer, have compassion, and live. Again this is not a book for people who are in the midst of the agony of a child's autism diagnosis. But for everyone else who is a seeker on the path of understanding what it means to be human, plunge in.
Rated by buyers -
Empty Fortress by Bruno Bettelheim was just another example of the ways in with Bettelheim fabricated evidence, to further his own view that autism is the result of a Freudian 'wish this child was dead' belief at the conscious or unconscious level.
It should also be remembered that he produced this book to justiy his lack of reports on the progress of a project he had been paid an enormous amount of money to undertake.
Nature versus the environment; a valid debate in any area of human science, but this manifestly corrupt contribution is of historical value in much the same way that a fake Da Vinci is.
Looks good, until you scratch the surface, with anything like decency or common sense.
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