Writing DEATH OF A THOUSAND CUTS
Living so many years in Chicago, I'd heard a lot about Bruno Bettelheim,
who ran a residential school for autistic children near the University of
Chicago in the 1960s and 70s. He was neither a psychologist nor a
psychiatrist, but he claimed to know how to treat autistics and he claimed
much improvement and many cures among his patients. He also wrote several
books that sold well, and was admired, even revered, for his wisdom about
children.
Bettelheim's thesis was that autism was caused by cold parenting,
particularly on the part of the mother. Even though little was known about
autism at the time, few other researchers had this view. Autism, they
knew, was at least four times more common in boys than in girls, and if one
of a pair of identical twins was autistic, the other was far more likely
than a random child to be autistic, which argued for a strong genetic
component.
Bettelheim not only told the parents that they had caused their child's
autism by bad parenting, he told the children so as well. It was said that
the toilets at the Orthogenic School kept getting stopped up. This
happened because the parents, most of them allowed by Bettelheim to see
their children only twice a year, frequently sent family pictures. The
children tore up the pictures and flushed them down the toilet.
Naturally, this is a person needing killing.
DEATH OF A THOUSAND CUTS is not a biography of Bettelheim. I have a
fictional Dr. Schermerhorn, who shares Bettelheim's arrogance and
certainty, and who is willing to destroy lives on an unproven theory. I'm
interested in what kind of person behaves this way and the effect on those
around him. How do they feel, years later, thinking that everything they
were told by him may have been wrong?
The book begins fifteen years after the close of the residential
school. Dr. Schermerhorn is holding a weekend reunion for former staff,
parents, patients, and therapists. During the first night, Schermerhorn is
horribly murdered in the basement of the building.
The other principal character is Chicago Police Detective Emily
Folkestone. She at first finds the autistics--now people in their
thirties--hard to understand and even rude. But in order to solve the
murder, she needs an understanding of how they see life. In the end, she
comes to empathize with them
For more about this and Barb's other books, see www.barbaradamato.com
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