A Vienna-born survivor of German concentration camps who came to the United States in 1939, Bettelheim exercised tremendous influence both through his methods and through such books as "Love is Not Enough," "The Empty Fortress" and "The Uses of Enchantment."

The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self.

At the very moment The Empty Fortress was clinching his reputation as a nonauthoritarian liberator of autistic children--in other words, during the Vietnam era--a ranting Bettelheim seized the podium as an authoritarian castigator of rebellious youth.

Now another team, Andrew J. Nathan, a Columbia University political scientist, and Robert S. Ross, a Boston College political scientist, have delivered a detailed argument for the other side with "The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress."

What he means is that Bettelheim fabricated his life, and that what he made of himself amounted to what he called his book about infantile autism, "The Empty Fortress."

Soon afterwards, Bettelheim wrote The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, in which he compared autism to being a prisoner in a concentration camp:

One of his most famous books, The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms.

What if the great Dr. Bettelheim, the champion of emotionally disturbed children and the author of "The Uses of Enchantment," "Freud and Man's Soul" and "The Empty Fortress," was in fact a bitter, sadistic, anti-Semitic, mother-hating liar?

And in his 1967 book "The Empty Fortress," he attributed autism to bad mothering.

His work with children there, many of whom were autistic, was the basis for some of his best known works, including "Love is Not Enough," "Truants from Life," "The Empty Fortress" and "A Home for the Heart."