A controversial figure After his suicide, evidence emerged darker side. His advisers at the University of Chicago considered him a major figure in psychology, but after his suicide, three ex-patients questioned his work and called it a cruel tyrant. In May 2005, over 90 former directors and former patients gathered in Chicago, more than 30 years after his retirement, to highlight the importance of Bettelheim in their lives. Unlike Bettelheim’s opponents, who are very active in the media, not journalists invited to the meeting. Jamie Tisch Bettelheim was convinced that autism had no organic basis, but was caused by cold mothers and absent fathers. “All my life,” he wrote, “I have worked with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them.” Other analysts followed Freud Bettelheim in his theory that autism in children is generated in the domestic dynamics.Bettelheim wrote a book called The Empty Fortress, where he spoke about autism. Currently remains unproven empirically that autism etiologically refer to an organic basis and that environmental factors determined behaviorally by parents or people who live around them are critical.