To the editors:
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He said, “The children were placed at the Orthogenic School because they could not function in normal family, social, or educational settings for their own highly personalized reasons.” Does he expect us to believe that the mere fact that someone chose to put us there is proof that we couldn’t function anywhere else? It’s true that there were some autistic children at the school and some with severe neurological problems. But for the most part, the school was being used as a dumping ground for young people who were “different” in some way or, for whatever reason, didn’t match their parents’ expectations. Many parents were given bad advice by “experts” and did not know that there were alternatives. Some of the young people needed to be in special classes for gifted youth or for those with disabilities in specific areas. Some needed treatment for medical problems. Some had been abused in the home or at school and needed an advocate. Some were just going through normal processes of growing up. To label all of these people as “psychotic,” as Bettelheim called us, was a truly evil act.
Herczeg claimed, “We did not speak of success or failure at the School, just as we did not refer to the children as autistic, schizophrenic, or borderline.” Maybe Herczeg himself didn’t use those terms, but Bettelheim certainly did, in person and in his published works.
Bettelheim might have been exposed to a much milder form of this sort of “nurturing” in the nursing home where he committed suicide. This survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald apparently preferred death to institutional living.
