PSYCHOLOGY'S FALSE PROPHET : SELF-INVENTION REVEALED TO BE PIONEER'S FORTE.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim''

Author: Richard Pollak

Data: Illustrated. 478 pages, Simon & Schuster; $28.

Our rating: Four Stars

By the time Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide at 86 on March 12, 1990, his had become a household name in America. As director of the Orthogenic School, the home for emotionally troubled children at the University of Chicago, and as the author of books like ``Love Is Not Enough'' and ``Truants From Life,'' he had secured his reputation as an expert on child psychology in general and on the condition known as infantile autism in particular. A disciple of Sigmund Freud, he blamed flawed mothering for the autistic child's apparent withdrawal from reality and insisted that a cure could be worked by detaching the child from the family.

But even as early as the 1960s, when Bettelheim was first broadcasting his success with autistic children, there were those who found fault with him: mothers of impaired children who had reared normal ones and researchers who suspected that autism had a genetic or other physical cause.

Among these critics was Richard Pollak, a journalist whose younger brother, Stephen, had gone to the Orthogenic School until his accidental death as an 11-year-old in 1948. As Pollak explains in the prologue to his arresting new book, ``The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim,'' he interviewed Bettelheim in 1969 and found his views of Stephen's condition disturbingly confused.

Years later, when Pollak's first draft of a memoir about his brother prompted an editor to suggest he write a biography of Bettelheim, he began to explore the therapist's background. The contrast between Bettelheim's reputation and the reality behind it moved Pollak to proceed with the present book.

The results are devastating. With exquisite politeness, Pollak writes that his subject embraced a philosophy that ``held, generally, that because life had no real purpose it was made livable only by pretending through fictions that it did.'' 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.''

As Pollak portrays him, the keys to Bettelheim's success seem to have been his facility with psychoanalytic insights, his ability to tyrannize his students and subordinates, and his gifts as a storyteller. With these talents, he made plausible the picture he drew of himself as a polymath with the following to his credit, in Pollak's summary: ``14 years at the University of Vienna, studies with Arnold Schoenberg, summa cum laude in three disciplines, two books published, training in all fields of psychology and membership in an organization that studied the emotional problems of children and adolescents.'' No wonder the public believed him to be the loving therapist who understood children and could cure autism, and who created the Orthogenic School as the very opposite of the concentration camps he said he had studied so systematically as a prisoner.

But the truth that Pollak unearths is otherwise. True, Bettelheim had earned a doctorate in philosophy, but his studies were interrupted by his having to run the family lumber business after his father's early death from syphilis. He had published no books; he had never met Freud, and whatever psychoanalytic theory he knew he had learned in order to impress a woman he was trying to win away from one of Freud's students, Otto Fenichel.

As for how Bettelheim ran the Orthogenic School: Pollak writes that despite the therapist's insistence that hitting the children was strictly forbidden, he evidently smacked and punched his charges, sexually abused several of the girls and relied in general on threats to intimidate his staff. Instead of being the opposite, the school if anything reflected Dachau and Buchenwald, his understanding of which he had in any case greatly exaggerated in his studies of concentration-camp life, Pollak concludes.

And only because of Bettelheim's later writing did the public come to believe in his ability to cure autism, Pollak adds. The therapist provided little opportunity to confirm his results. What scanty evidence remains suggests that his patients were not even autistic in the first place.

Having cut Bettelheim down to almost nothing, Pollak relates the last years of his subject's life with a note of pity. The strain of self-fabrication seemed to tell. Despite being praised and honored in his old age, Bettelheim grew increasingly unhappy and depressed, in part because he felt that the psychoanalytic establishment had never accepted him. When his devoted wife died in 1984, he raged Lear-like at his children and spoke of suicide to his friends. On the 52nd anniversary of the Nazis' invasion of Austria, he consumed a quantity of drugs and whiskey and tied a plastic bag over his head.

Yet the reader doesn't entirely give up on Bettelheim. True, Pollak draws a convincing portrait of an insecure yet too clever man who made it all up as he went along, glibly exploiting this country's gullible belief in the easy psychoanalytic fix. Yet his passion for that fix partly redeems him, because despite his lack of real training he told such inspiring stories of the human soul's capacity to understand and heal itself.

He is redeemed in part, too, by his capacity for survival, not to mention the fact that some of the children who attended the school have had successful careers, whatever may have been wrong with them at the time. Yet when all is said and done, Bettelheim seems to have re-enacted the archetypal American success story of inventing a false past, concocting a new formula for snake oil and selling it to the public with flummery. Under Pollak's magnifying glass, Bettelheim is seen in a new, harsh light, and stands exposed as a brilliant charlatan.

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Photo: (1--2) Child-psychology and autism pioneer Bruno Bettelheim's background and research are subjected to intense scrutiny in a new book by journalist Richard Pollak, above.