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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent resource for those seeking truth
Review: From the beginning of this magnificent book until the last page, the reader will gain knowledge that is significant and of great importance. I highly recommend it to all mental health professionals seeking a deeper understanding of the psyche and the development of the personality. Often lambasted for his views that the child suffers from a lack of love from his or her parents, a truth that offends many support groups, Bettelheim captures a rarity - the truth - and expands upon it in ways that wil enlighten and expand the reader's vision.
Rating: 
Summary: Somebody phone the publisher...
Review: I can't believe that this book is still available! Dr. Rimland took Bruno Bettelheim on decades ago and found that there was absolutely no basis for his destructive theories.
Reading this book is like taking bloodletting as a serious and effective cure for disease!
Rating:
Summary: Has anyone actually read this book?
Review: Just recently Dr. James Dobson came on the radio reporting that an orphanage in Belgium was so understaffed that workers never had time to hold the babies, even when feeding them. Not surprisingly, ALL the babies suffered from pervasive arrested develpment--autism. For some reason no one gets mad at Dobson for describing the exact thing pointed out by Bettelheim. The only difference is that Bettelheim dared to suggest that there are neglectful mothers in the world who might behave just like the over-worked staff in the Belgium orphanage. The facts are there for all to see. All one has to do is open the damn book! Bettelheim simply provided a theoretical basis for Dobson's observations. Moreover, Bettelheim believed that ANY sort of trauma during a critical phase of develpment can lead to autism. On top of that, he believed that even minor trauma can lead to autism if an infant has a CONSTITUTIONAL PREDISPOSITION to autism. People who read this book and get enraged and nauseated have chips of their shoulders. They're like ignorant Mau Mau's getting all excited over NOTHING.
Rating:
Summary: Has anyone actually read this book?
Review: Just recently Dr. James Dobson came on the radio reporting that an orphanage in Belgium was so understaffed that workers never had time to hold the babies, even when feeding them. Not surprisingly, ALL the babies suffered from pervasive arrested develpment--autism. For some reason no one gets mad at Dobson for describing the exact thing pointed out by Bettelheim. The only difference is that Bettelheim dared to suggest that there are neglectful mothers in the world who might behave just like the over-worked staff in the Belgium orphanage. The facts are there for all to see. All one has to do is open the damn book! Bettelheim simply provided a theoretical basis for Dobson's observations. Moreover, Bettelheim believed that ANY sort of trauma during a critical phase of develpment can lead to autism. On top of that, he believed that even minor trauma can lead to autism if an infant has a CONSTITUTIONAL PREDISPOSITION to autism. People who read this book and get enraged and nauseated have chips of their shoulders. They're like ignorant Mau Mau's getting all excited over NOTHING.
Rating:
Summary: The Orthogenic Fantasy
Review: Ooops. Bettelheim forgot to mention that he terrorized the children in his care by beating them in the head with his fists, slamming their heads into walls, whipping girls with their pants pulled down, etc.
The O.S. was an abusive cult. This is documented in "Residential Treatment: The Potential for Cultic Evolution", a paper by David A. Halperin, M.D. at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York and Arnold Markowitz, M.S.W.
at the Cult Hotline and Clinic, New York.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs to be reclassified as a history book
Review: Sickening. It is clear that this book is from the anals of the classic "Blame the Mommy" era, when anything that went slightly wrong with a child was, of course, Mommy's fault!
Having pored through this book, and books like Dibs in Search of Self, I see red when Autism is referred to as a psychological disorder. Bettleheim managed to ruin many a family by coldly claiming it was the fault of "refridgerator parents" where a normal baby gave up and withdrew, becoming autistic, but in the interest of history, and of the excuse "thinking of the times", they didn't have any clearer answers back then, and went with what they knew, hence the two-star rating instead of one.
Autism is a neruobilogical disorder. Imagine yourself with your senses so hyper- or hypo-sensetive, and your ability to process that information curtailed and often painful or disorienting, and your life is reduced to vague, disconnected bits of events.
After reading books like Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere by Donna Williams, and Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues by Bears kaufman, even Let Me Hear Your Voice by Catherine Maurice, this is even more clear.
I am especially startled when I read Donna Williams' books. She is a high-order autistic who spent the first four years of her life completely oblivious to the world around her. She only forced herself to relate to the world as a sake of survivial, or she would never have come as far as she did.
(I have also known a high-functioning autistic or two who told me that doing stuff like rocking their heads back and forth or flapping their hands gave them great relief--it was predictible and they "lost themselves" in the motion--it soothed their hypersensitivy and kept their senses within tolerance levels.)
So perhaps for me it is not a big stretch of the imagination to see why autistic children often indulge in self-stimulatory behaivor.
A normal child locking himself into a world of bizzare ritualistic behaivors and oblivion to others around him doesn't do it to protest a cold unloving environment. They truly cannot relate. This book belongs on the history shelf, not on any psych shelf.
And yes, I do believe it is possible for an autistic child to recover, but not through psychoanalysis. Early intervention is critical, but if done, increases chances a child can progress into societal norms, and even leave Autism behind entirely.
Rating:
Summary: do not read!
Review: The Empty Fortress remains, to date, one of the best widely known and must-read references about autism. I read some of the previous review but they really look weird to me: accusing Bettelheim (one of the best doctors out there, who also endured killing fileds during world war II) of introducing standard point of view is like firgetting that some of points of view are standard since HE set that standard, and accsuing him of being out of date would be like accusing Freud of being antiquated. I am positive we will discover more things over time about autism, but whatever you're going to discover is already in this book. 3 clinic cases, with a chapter leading and trailing the whole book, with some of the most refined insights about autism. Trashing a book like this would mean trashing the experience of an intelligent person that spanned trhough 50 years: some can afford it. I can't. And whoever is going to deal with autism in a scientific way (without expressions like "guts") cannot do without this book. Would be like a psychoanalyst who says "hey Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle is trash"; what would it define in your point of view, Freud or the "reviewer"?
Rating:
Summary: Sickening
Review: This book is a crock of steaming donkey dung. I am shocked at the three good reviews it got. I hope more people write in to expose Bettelheim for the abusive jerk he was. Bettelheim claims in this book that autism is an emotional disorder, caused by abuse/and or neglect. Apparently, if an autistic child's parents can stop being so incompetent and the child has some sort of Freudian therapy, the autistic child can be cured. Scientific research has proven this hypothesis to be incorrect. Autism is neurological. Several parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, frontal lobe, and amygdala either fail to develop normally or are damaged very early in life. Some research supports the theory that people are born autistic. Recent data is also showing that toxic metals poisoning and food intolerances can also play a large role. None of this has anything to do with bad parenting! Bettelheim caused terrible damage in his time. Many parents of autistic children suffered from being incorrectly blamed for their child's autism. The children themselves also suffered, for as a result they were usually locked away in institutions or given the therapy Bettelheim recommended, while they could have been receiving beneficial intervention. Since the rejection of Bettelheim's ideas, many excellent interventions to help autistic people have been developed, and the true nature of autism is much better understood. We still have a long ways to go, but tossing Bettelheim's trash out was an important step forwards. To re-accept his theory, as some readers here suggest, would be a tragic regression. I would like to add that I come from a unique perspective here. I am a high-functioning autistic. My parents were wonderful parents who did the best they could with their alien child. They did not cause me to be who I am. Furthermore, I am not broken, as Bettelheim would claim. It is so easy to write off what we don't understand as something bad, needing to be fixed. This is the mistake that the author of this book tragically made.
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