Introduction:

In March of 1959, public intellectual, principal of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago (subsequently referred to as the O School), and Jewish concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim published two articles that presented seemingly disparate narratives of autism. 1 One article "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'" was published in the popular periodical Scientific American and served as many U.S. American's introduction to autism, or to use Bettelheim's term, to Childhood Schizophrenia Autistic type. 2 This article described Joey, a ten-year old boy from a white, presumably native born, middle-class family. Bettelheim claimed that Joey "was a child who had been robbed of his humanity." He argued that Joey had been dehumanized and rendered robotic by his parents', particularly his mother's, emotional negligence. 3 Specifically, he stated that "by treating him (Joey) mechanically his parents made him a machine." 4 The other article, titled "Feral Children, Autistic Children," appeared in The American Journal of Sociology, published by Bettelheim's home institution of the University of Chicago. This article argued that Kamala the famous "wolf girl" of Midnapore India, who had been written about by anthropologist Robert Zingg and Yale Psychologist Arnold Gesell in the 1940s, was not raised by wolves, as had been previously suggested; instead, she "had suffered from severe infantile autism, accountable without a history of being reared by animals." 5 Bettelheim justified his diagnosis of Kamala by arguing that her behavior was similar to that of other "wild" autistic children he had worked with. Of note, he compared Kamala's behavior to that of a young Jewish girl named Anna who was a student at the O School. Bettelheim described Anna as "a wild child with animal like traits" who had spent her earliest years hiding from Nazi persecution in occupied Poland. 6 Versions of both articles would later be included in Bettelheim's seminal 1967 book on autism The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. 7 The Empty Fortress further utilized Anna's story to draw comparisons between the supposed dehumanization of autistic children, and the supposed dehumanization of certain concentration camp inmates, who Bettelheim perceived as having given up on any hope of survival; other inmates referred to this group as "moslems". 8

"Joey, a 'Mechanical Boy'" has become almost synonymous with histories of autism. Not only has the article itself been referenced and analyzed by numerous scholars but the idea of the "mechanical boy" is used as a shorthand to invoke mid-twentieth century United States understandings of autism. 9 It is unsurprising that the narrative of the mechanical boy has garnered attention, given that it fits well with contemporary associations between autism and technical intelligence. 10 Yet, the mechanical boy was not the only narrative of autism that Bettelheim presented. This article argues that in order to understand Bettelheim's portrayal of autism, it is necessary to read the narrative of the mechanical boy alongside Bettelheim's other narratives of autism. Specifically, it is necessary to read it alongside Bettelheim's narratives of the autistic child as "wild child/wolf girl," and his comparison between autistic children and some of his fellow concentration camp inmates, who he referred to as "moslems." While seemingly disparate these narratives are actually deeply intertwined. These narratives of incurable "wild children" and "moslem" concentration camp inmates served as the necessary contrast to the rehabilitation/assimilation/cure narrative of the mechanical boy. Reading these narratives of autism alongside each other helps uncover the often-elided role of race in shaping professional and public understandings of autism. This article problematizes contemporary and historical formations of autism as a white, middle-class, male "disorder" by making explicit the role of race in the construction of early narratives of autism.

This article will also argue that in the late 1950s and the 1960s Bruno Bettelheim used narratives of autism to promote a new model of white technocratic masculinity in the United States. The creation of this new model of white technocratic masculinity was bound up with the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. Bettelheim presented whiteness as something that Ashkenazi Jews in America could achieve through a process of assimilation/rehabilitation/cure that rid them of supposedly pathological "Jewish" traits. In turn Jewish elites and public intellectuals such as Bettelheim, Philip Roth, and Nathan Glazer presented a model of whiteness in which the privileges of whiteness were framed as entitlements earned through compliance with normative white, Protestant, nuclear family life and through utilization of "expertise" that allowed them to thrive as members of the "New Class" of knowledge workers in the post-war era. What I refer to as "white technocratic masculinity" was premised on this new cultural and supposedly meritocratic model of whiteness and white privilege. This model of whiteness as an earned entitlement was then adopted by mainstream white American culture. 11 This narrative of assimilation/rehabilitation/cure through white, Protestant, middle-class, domesticity and technocratic expertise is epitomized in Bettelheim's discussion of Joey, the so-called mechanical boy. Bettelheim claimed that Joey was transformed from a "machine" into a "human child" through the application of psychoanalytic expertise and immersion in the white, middle-class, gender-normative, Protestant milieu of the O School. 12 This narrative of cure existed alongside and was reliant upon the pathologizing of those framed as the incurable "Eastern" other, including "wild children" and "moslem" concentration camp inmates. Bettelheim's narratives of autism created a sharp distinction between those who were perceived as curable and assimilable and were thus framed as worthy of being seen as fully human and those who were perceived as incurable and unassimilable and thus were framed as existing beyond the bounds of full humanity. They do this by contrasting the cure and assimilation narrative of the "mechanical boy" with racialized, gendered, and pathologized narratives of "wolf girls," "wild children" and "moslem" concentration camp inmates.

Edward Said has argued that in the post-war era the European and American image of the Jew had become "bifurcated." On one side was the "Jewish hero, constructed out of the reconstructed cult of the adventurer-pioneer-Orientalist" on the other was "his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab oriental." 13 The whitening of Ashkenazi Jews was dependent on the continued denigration of the "Eastern," "Arab," "Moslem" other. Bettelheim's writing about autism can be read as narratives establishing the boundaries of this distinction. This can be seen by examining four of Bettelheim's autism narratives. Within these narratives Bettelheim served as the embodiment of the white Western hero who used his scientific expertise to civilize/cure children like Joey the "mechanical boy." In contrast, "moslem" concentration camp inmates, Kamala the "wolf girl" of Midnapore, and her caretaker Reverend Singh, were assigned the role of the "Eastern" other who is unable to assimilate and achieve whiteness. Anna and her mother were portrayed as liminal cases of Ashkenazi Jewish women who failed to meet the demands of white, American, middle-class, Protestant gender norms and were thus deemed to be "feral".

It is critical to examine the impact of race, gender, and class on narratives of autism because autism is often represented as a white, male, middle-class disorder. Autistic self-advocates, and scholars have commented on what Morénike Giwa Onaiwu has described as autism's "white privilege problem." This problem most often presents through the refusal to acknowledge or support autistic people of color and their families. 14 Historically, white children, particularly white boys, have been much more likely to be diagnosed with autism than are children of color. 15 The process of diagnosis has also historically been faster, and thus less expensive and resource intensive for white autistic people. 16 Portrayals of autistic characters or autistic coded characters in popular media are almost always middle-class, white boys or men. 17 Black autistic activists in particular, including Onaiwu, Tiffany Hammond, Catina Burkett, and Anita Cameron, have been vocal about how stereotypes that frame autism as a white, male disorder have prevented them from accessing necessary resources, and have left them particularly vulnerable to state and interpersonal violence when autistic traits are instead interpreted through the lens of perceived Black animosity and criminality. 18

Scholars such as Paul Heilker, Anna Hooge, Malcolm Matthews, and Griffin Epstein have analyzed the critical role that whiteness, and particularly white masculinity plays in current understandings of autism. 19 Matthews examines the trope of the white male autistic "techno-savant" that has become widespread in media portrayals of autism. He argues that the association between autism and both technological proficiency and whiteness is used to legitimize notions that white people are somehow biologically and/or culturally better suited to technical pursuits than people of color, and "entrenches ethnic whiteness as a prerequisite for the human elite." 20 Majia Nadesan and Jordynn Jack have both theorized that the stereotype that autistic people are technologically gifted has contributed to the public fascination with autism in the late 20^th and early 21^th century. 21 It is thus worth exploring how autism came to be associated with both middle-class, white, masculinity and technological competence, as well as how this narrative arose alongside and relied upon other differently racialized narratives of autism.

Despite the rich and vital conversations that are happening about the racialization of autism, both within but largely outside of academic spaces, historical studies of autism often fail to address the role of race in shaping the development of autism as a diagnosis. 22 While some works challenge the association between autism and maleness, they often fail to note that autism is not conflated with masculinity as much as it is conflated with a certain type of white masculinity. 23 Race, and particularly ideas about whiteness, have shaped how autism is understood since the diagnosis was first developed, yet their impact often goes unmarked. This reflects a general tendency to at once ignore and take for granted the whiteness of autism in the 21^st century United States. 24 This article furthers the work of attending to the role of race and gender in autism history. To fully contend with the whiteness embedded in contemporary understandings of autism, it is critical to examine the origins of these stereotypes.

Scholars such as Majia Nadesan, Gil Eyal and Chloe Silverman have emphasized the importance of understanding the construction of autism as a diagnosis during the 40s, 50s, and 60s as a product of larger societal factors. 25 Jordynn Jack and Mical Raz have demonstrated the critical role that gendered tropes, particularly that of the overly educated "refrigerator mother" who was supposedly unable to connect with her child, played in the proliferation of autism as a diagnosis. 26 Christopher Sterwald and Jeffrey Baker have demonstrated that Leo Kanner, whose 1943 paper "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact," helped introduce autism as a discrete diagnosis, actively constructed autism as a diagnosis impacting children from middle and upper-middle class intellectual families, although Sterwald and Baker do not explicitly address the role of whiteness in this process. 27 Griffin Epstein addresses related topics in his 2014 article "Refrigerator Mothers and Sick Little Boys: Bruno Bettelheim, Eugenics and the De-pathologization of Jewish Identity." Epstein, whose late uncle was a former student at the O School during Bettelheim's tenure there, writes about Bettelheim's role in the de-pathologization and whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity in the mid to late 20^th-century. 28 My paper expands upon Epstein's work by carefully examining the process by which Bettelheim contributed to the whitening of Jewish identity through his narratives of autism.

I also draw on James Fisher's argument in his 2008 article "No Search, No Subject" that "the best-known literary works treating autism in America are conversion narratives" in which a neurotypical teacher is able to restore an autistic person's humanity. 29 Drawing on Fisher's work this paper argues that three of Bettelheim's primary narratives of autism, that of the "mechanical boy," the "wild child" and the comparison between autistic people and certain concentration camp inmates, are not only conversion narratives but assimilation narratives; or rather in the case of the latter two, narratives of a failure to assimilate. Griffin Epstein has argued that for Bettelheim the desirable form of assimilation was assimilation to whiteness, and with it the adoption of white, middle-class, Christian, gender norms. Analyzing parallels between the notion of the "refrigerator mother" and antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish womanhood, Epstein has argued that for Bettelheim the psychogenic model of autism was "a diagnostic/medicalized attempt at contending with/seeking to cure Jewish difference." According to Epstein, Bettelheim "proscribed total assimilation as the "cure" for both Jewishness and madness." 30 This focus on assimilation can be seen in Bettelheim's narratives of autism in which those who do not comply with white, middle-class, Christian, patriarchal norms are portrayed as pathological and subhuman.

"Moslem" Concentration Camp Inmates, Autistic Children, and New Orientalism:

Bettelheim's narratives of autism are in many ways a continuation on themes of assimilation, adaptation, race, modernity, autonomy, and the relationship between the individual and "mass society" that shaped Bettelheim's life and work and haunted post-war American society. Bettelheim grappled with questions of the psychological possibilities and perils of assimilation to what he and his contemporaries referred to as "mass society." Originally developed by European scholars in the 1930s as a way of trying to understand the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, by the 1950s "mass society" had become a convenient catch-all used to refer to a variety of bugaboos of modernity, including the rise of large-scale bureaucracies in both government and business, and technological advancements from the proliferation of televisions and home appliances to the development of the atomic bomb. 31 Bettelheim argued that both autism and the concentration camp epitomized the alienating, dehumanizing nature of "mass society." This culminated in Bettelheim's controversial comparison in his 1967 book on autism The Empty Fortress between those who he framed as the greatest victims of mass society, concentration camp inmates who he characterized as having lost their will to survive, and autistic children. Both groups according to Bettelheim had experienced "dehumanization" under mass society and had failed to maintain their sense of autonomy. Bettelheim argued that while there was no hope for those who had died in the camps, autistic children could be "cured" through immersion in an idealized white American, middle-class, Christian, domestic environment, or milieu. 32 He offered this opportunity for "cure" at the O School where he served as the principal from 1943-1974. 33

In The Empty Fortress Bettelheim made an explicit and prolonged comparison between the psychological responses/behaviors of autistic children, particularly those he had worked with at the O School, and those of certain inmates in Nazi concentration camps. He argued that members of both groups had lost their humanity in response to what he referred to as an extreme situation. Bettelheim claimed that "Some victims of the concentration camps had lost their humanity in response to extreme situations. Autistic children withdraw from the world before their humanity ever really develops." 34 Bettelheim, who from 1938-1939 had spent almost a year as an inmate in Dachau and Buchenwald, imprisoned for existing as a Jewish man in Nazi occupied Vienna, based this comparison off of his own experiences and interviews he conducted with other inmates while imprisoned. 35 Bettelheim claimed that much of his work, including The Empty Fortress was inspired by the observations he made at Dachau and Buchenwald. 36

Bettelheim first introduced this comparison between autistic children and certain concentration camp inmates through the story of Anna, a Polish Jewish autistic student at the Orthogenic School who had spent her earliest years in hiding from the Nazis in an underground bunker. Bettelheim noted that "Although Anna was not a child of the German Concentration camps, her life history was such as to bring them sharply to mind. Through her, the phenomenon of the camps which had long occupied much of my personal and theoretical interests [1943, 1960] became somehow linked with my daily work, the treatment of severely disturbed children." 37 Bettelheim claimed that Anna's background made him speculate that there could be a potential "connection…between the two kinds of inhumanity I(Bettelheim) had known—one inflicted for political reasons on victims of a social system, the other perhaps a self-chosen state of dehumanization." 38 For Bettelheim, autistic children and certain concentration camp inmates were tied together by their lack/loss of humanity. Far from incidental Bettelheim claimed that this connection was a critical factor in his interest in autism. He noted that "though my own interest had been great from the start, I only became fully involved at a point where human and theoretical issues crossed a uniquely personal one, and this happened when Anna came to live with us." 39

Bettelheim went on to make direct comparisons between the behaviors he had witnessed at Dachau and Buchenwald and those of autistic children at the O School. He stated that "it occurred to me that once before I had not only witnessed but also partially described the whole gamut of autistic and schizophrenic reactions—not in children but in adults…I refer to my discussions of the German concentration camps[ 1943,1960] and on their radical effects on the personality of prisoners." 40 Yet, Bettelheim claimed that not all concentration camp inmates "deteriorated to near autistic behavior" this transformation only occurred "when the feeling of doom penetrated so deep that it brought the added conviction of imminent death. Such men were referred to as "moslems" in the camps and other prisoners avoided them as if in fear of contagion." 41 Bettelheim claimed that these inmates were referred to as "moslems" because "the connotation was that they had resigned themselves to death unresisting, if this was the will of the SS(or of Allah)." 42 Bettelheim argued that it was this resignation that led to the inmates' deterioration. He claimed that "Those on the other hand, who remained convinced they could act on their own behalf and who did act, remained free, in the main, of severest pathology, though the actual dangers were no different for them." 43 Thus, according to Bettelheim "moslem" inmates were not entirely a product of their environment but rather, of their response to their environment. Other inmates, including it is implied Bettelheim himself, were able to avoid this fate despite exposure to an equally "extreme situation."

According to Bettelheim the primary distinction between "moslem" inmates and other concentration camp inmates lay in their response to camp life. Bettelheim claimed that "as long as a prisoner fought in any way for survival, for some self-assertion within and against the overpowering environment, he could not become a "moslem"." 44 Bettelheim described "moslem" inmates as those who were unable to maintain their autonomy within the camps. They thus stood in contrast to other inmates, particularly to Bettelheim himself. Bettelheim distanced himself from these inmates, emphasizing that "to the other prisoners, but also to the SS, this seemed a totally alien "Eastern" acceptance of death." 45 This description also implies that the term "moslem" was used to mark these prisoners as other and had racialized connotations. Bettelheim equated the "alien" and the "Eastern" invoking orientalist and Islamophobic stereotypes. Critically, what marked these inmates as "alien" was their passivity, a gendered as well as racialized trait. Bettelheim described "moslem" prisoners as being emasculated, claiming that "the moslem who let the SS get hold of him, not just physically but emotionally too, went on to internalize the SS attitude that he was less than a man, that he was not to act on his own, that he had no personal will." 46 Bettelheim equated the pathological, the alien, the unmanly, and the "Eastern," framing all of them as passive and ultimately inhuman. He contrasted this state of passive inhumanity with autonomy which he equated with sanity/ablemindedness, manhood, and the unspoken "Westerness" that was presumed to be a requirement for full humanity.

In Bettelheim's account "moslem" concentration camp inmates embodied all of the worst antisemitic stereotypes that had been placed on Jews in Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They were pathological, passive, feminized, and racially other. 47 By attributing these traits to certain inmates Bettelheim may have been attempting to distance himself and other Jewish inmates from these stereotypes. Bettelheim made it clear that these traits were not an innate result of their Jewishness. In fact, he gave no indication that Jewish inmates were any more likely to become "moslems" than their gentile counterparts. Instead, the transformation occurred because of an inmate's individual failings. It was their beliefs and behaviors, their failure to maintain the absolute control over their bodyminds that is demanded in an ableist society even under the most extreme of conditions, which rendered them "alien" and inhuman. For Bettelheim writing for an American audience in 1967 these inmates represented that abject, foreign, racialized other that Ashkenazi Jews needed to reject if they were to gain the full privileges of whiteness in the United States.

This dichotomy between the "East" and the "West" is a reoccurring theme in Bettelheim's writing. Eleven years after Bettelheim's discussion of "moslem" inmates' "'Eastern' Acceptance of death" in The Empty Fortress, Edward Said would publish his groundbreaking work Orientalism. In Orientalism Said argued that European and American representations of the "East" and the "Orient" were and are largely a product of European and American self-invention. That is European and American depictions of Asia, particularly Southwest Asia (The Middle East), and South Asia were/are not based on the realities of life in these places but rather on European and American constructions of these places as the exotic "other" against which they could define themselves as the "West." Said used the term orientalism to describe this tendency. He argued that orientalism was able to rise to prominence as a system of thought because it served to justify European and eventually American exploitation of Asia and particularly of South and Southwest Asia. 48 Said examined contemporary American representations of Arab people and of Muslims, noting that the two terms were used interchangeably in both popular and academic discourse. He emphasized that in the post-war era new forms of orientalism had arisen in the wake of the rise of American involvement in Southwest Asia and the creation of the State of Israel. These new forms of orientalism drew on pre-existing stereotypes about Arab people and Islam to justify American and Israeli imperialism/colonialism. This new orientalism inherited "a certain cultural hostility" towards the Orient and emphasized the "expertise" (quotes included in the original text) of social scientists. 49 It is critical to understand Bettelheim's discussions of "moslem" inmates within the context of this new orientalism. For Bettelheim "moslem" inmates served as the passive, inhuman other against which he could define his own autonomy and humanity.

Wild Girls and the Eastern Other:

Bettelheim's writing about Kamala, who had been dubbed the "wolf girl of Midnapore" by the British and American press in the mid-1920s, illustrates how Bettelheim used images of "The East" as exotic, other and irrational to demonstrate his own "Western," masculine, scientific expertise within his narratives of autism. Kamala was a young Indian girl living in an orphanage in Midnapore whose story gained prominence in the Anglo-phone press from the mid-1920s to the1940s after reports arose that she had been raised by wolves. 50 Bettelheim, along with others, refuted the idea that Kamala had been raised by wolves. What differentiated Bettelheim's argument was that he argued that Kamala, and Amala, a younger girl who had been found with her, were autistic and had likely been abandoned by their families. Bettelheim supported his argument by comparing Kamala's behavior to that of "wild children" he had worked with at the O School. 51 Anna, the girl whose story he claimed had helped him to establish a connection between autism and the concentration camps, was the most detailed of these comparisons. 52

Bettelheim used Kamala as his primary example of a "wild child." Much of the content of "Feral Children" consisted of Bettelheim listing Kamala's supposedly "wild" traits and explaining why they were a result of autism, rather than a result of having been raised by wolves. In doing so he compared Kamala's behavior directly with that of other "wild" children who he had worked with at the O School. 53 Kamala was framed as the paradigmatic "wild child." While Bettelheim explicitly compared Kamala to children at the O School who he describes as being "for the most part children of intelligent, educated parents, reared in middle class homes," his use of an Indian girl as the prototypical image of the "wild child" has racial implications. 54 This is especially true given that he was writing during a period marked by anti-colonial struggle and movements for/towards decolonization.

Kamala served as an ultimate other in Bettelheim's writing. Bettelheim racialized not only Kamala but also her environment, and the narrative of Kamala as a "wolf girl." Framing Kamala and her environment as the epitome of irrationality allowed Bettelheim to place himself in the role of the rational expert whose knowledge and experience were needed to tame both "wild" children and the myth of the wolf girl itself. The role of the scientific expert took on great importance as a means of establishing claims to (white) masculinity in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially for Jewish male professionals. 55 In Bettelheim's narrative Kamala and the idea that she was raised by wolves both represented the threat of the "irrational" to human civilization which needed to be delt with by rational technocratic experts like Bettelheim.

Bettelheim never met Kamala who died of tuberculosis in Midnapore in 1929. 56 His knowledge of her was based primarily on an account by her caretaker Reverend J.A.L. Singh. 57 Singh was a Christian missionary who had attended the Bishop's College of Calcutta and had established an orphanage in Midnapore. Singh claimed to have found Kamala and Amala living amongst wolves on one of his annual "missionary tours in search of the aboriginals" in 1920. 58 Singh then brought the two girls back to his orphanage. Amala, the younger of the two girls, died of illness in 1921. After the story of the "wolf girls" was covered in the Westminster Gazette and the New York Times, Singh began to receive inquiries from scientists, including from Dr. Robert M. Zingg an American anthropologist with whom he would publish his account of Kamala's life in the 1939 book Wolf Children and Feral Man. 59

It is unsurprising that the narrative of Kamala as a "wolf girl" gained traction amongst American social scientists. The concept of a child raised by wild animals has a long history in European thought. It dates back at least to the story of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome who were said to have been suckled by a she-wolf. These stories were of particular interest to social scientists who saw such children as a means of testing long debated theories about nature versus nurture. 60 Adriana Benzaquén has shown that the notion of the wild child who had been raised by wolves had deep roots in Anglo-American scientific thinking. Benzaquén a historian of childhood, defines "wild children" as "children presumed to have been raised by animals or spent most of their early lives in isolation from other people." She has traced how the idea of "wild children" has fascinated western thinkers since the 14^th century and how wild children "have had a privileged role as objects of knowledge in Western human science." 61 Benzaquén explains that while there were earlier accounts of children being raised by wild animals in Europe, by the late 19^th and 20^th century, western accounts of children being raised by animals were all set in "exotic" colonial or postcolonial locations, with India being especially common. 62

In his article "Feral Children, Autistic Children" Bettelheim sought to reinterpret the narrative presented in Wolf Children and Feral Man to reflect his own theories about autism. In doing so, he framed himself as the western scientific expert who used reason to triumph over superstition. In "Feral Children and Autistic Children" and The Empty Fortress, Bettelheim drew on both the image of the psy expert, which had gained prominence in the post-war United States, and the stereotype of the wild "Eastern" Other to frame himself as the western expert using his psychological knowledge to bring reason and rationality to bear not only on Kamala's bodymind but on the thinking of her caretaker and chronicler Reverend Singh. 63 In order to do this, Bettelheim had to obscure the role that American academics like Zingg and Gesell played in producing and publicizing the narrative of Kamala as a "wolf girl." Bettelheim attempted to frame the idea of the "wolf girl" as an Indigenous rather than a colonialist narrative.

Bettelheim reinterpreted the narrative that Kamala was raised by wolves as superstitious and contrasted it with what he portrayed as more enlightened and reasonable ways of understanding human behavior. He noted that "the origins of the subhuman, animal-like behavior of these children are, in our enlightened age, no longer sought in the world of spirits. In this day of reason, we think, of course, of childhood environment as the source of their behavior." 64 Bettelheim thus evoked the long shadow of the enlightenment to frame his argument as rational and thus superior. The belief that Kamala and other children were raised by wolves was portrayed as regressive. Bettelheim claimed that "on first encounter with their wildness, and, thereafter, when their total withdrawal, their 'contrariness,' their violence, or other types of inhuman, animal-like behavior have overpowered us and made it harder for us to deal rationally with their onslaught, then, and despite all our knowledge, we too are thrown back for moments to feel that they are possessed-that they are 'animals'." 65 Here Bettelheim framed Kamala's behavior as an active challenge to rational thought, that compelled those who interacted with her to be "thrown back" into regressive, superstitious and irrational ways of thinking.

Bettelheim sought to draw a connection between the idea that Kamala was raised by wolves and local religious beliefs. He speculated that "if the people of the region where the two girls of Midnapore were found believed in the trans- migration of souls and were confronted with the behavior of the girls, is it not possible that they thought of them as having been wolves in a previous incarnation or of now representing an incarnation that was part wolf, part human?" Bettelheim noted that "Such beliefs were unacceptable to the Reverend Singh, but perhaps they were part of his ingrained thinking before he became a student of Bishop's College in Calcutta." 66 Bettelheim notably did not speculate as to whether Zingg or Gesell's religious beliefs or cultural backgrounds might have impacted their interpretation of Singh's narrative. Yet, Bettelheim framed Reverend Singh's interpretation of events as having been tainted by his "ingrained" beliefs, preventing him from viewing the situation in an "enlightened," rational manner. Bettelheim thus attempted to separate the narrative of the "wolf child" from its origins in European thought and instead attribute it to local religious beliefs.

Bettelheim never explicitly defined the term "wild child" preferring to describe various traits that the children demonstrated which he characterized as "wild." He used the idea of the "wild child" in his definition of feral children noting that "The term "feral child,… is not a definite diagnostic category but vaguely denotes very wild children and those supposedly reared by animals." 67 Here the meaning of term wild children was implied to be self-evident. The term "wild child" was a constructed category under which both "feral children," that is children who were believed to have been raised by animals, and certain autistic children could be placed.

Bettelheim's goal was to demonstrate that the behavior of "feral children," children who people claimed had been raised by wolves or other animals "strongly resembled that of severe cases of infantile autism with seemingly animal-like traits and habits being treated at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago" in order to argue that "most of the so-called feral children were actually children suffering from the severest form of infantile autism." 68 Thus, he tended to define wildness as behaviors that might make people believe that a child had been raised by animals. Some traits which he characterized as wild include violence, particularly biting and scratching, a preference for being active at night, a preference for raw foods, and eating and drinking with one's mouth directly from the plate. 69 Bettelheim emphasized that most autistic children were not wild, noting that "It should be stressed again that only a small minority of known autistic children are "wild"." 70

Bettelheim argued that people were willing to believe that Kamala was raised by wolves in part because her behavior was so "strange," "inexplicable" and "unacceptable" that it seemed to defy rational explanation. 71 He claimed that "the rational mind, which at first rejected the story of Kamala's behavior, turned out to be an unreliable instrument. Therefore, its critical voice was silenced, as far as these stories were concerned, and henceforth everything was believed as told." 72 Kamala's behavior is framed as being so irrational that it challenges that rationality of those around her. Bettelheim presented Kamala as the embodiment of "Eastern" and autistic otherness. Her behavior was so strange that she could only be understood, interpreted, and countered through the application of scientific expertise.

Bettelheim's description of Kamala, his insistence on diagnosing her as autistic, and his rejection of the wolf girl narrative are perhaps best understood as examples of what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson terms "the violence of humanization." Jackson argues that much of what is described as "dehumanization" is better understood as violently coopting people into a racially hierarchized universal humanity. Jackson claims that this notion of universal humanity is itself premised on anti-Blackness. She holds that the concepts of Blackness/Black(ened) humanity, and animality were mutually constructed to serve as the limit cases of humanity in Eurocentric humanist thought. The existence of these limit cases then allowed the construction of a developmental model of humanity in which "full" "rational" humanity is presented as an achievement to be attained. 73 While it has been shown that the narrative of the wolf girl as it was applied to Kamala had colonialist origins, Bettelheim ignored this in order to frame himself as an enlightened expert who looked beyond local superstition to acknowledge Kamala's humanity, even as he described her behavior as "subhuman," "inhuman," "irrational," and "animal like." 74 Bettelheim used the rhetoric of psychology and particularly of autism to incorporate Kamala into a racist hierarchy of universal humanity while portraying her humanity as abject and lesser. Kamala's abject, partial, irrational humanity served as a necessary contrast to the rational humanity of Bettelheim as the "western" expert.

"Feral Mothers" and Jewish Gender Deviance:

Bettelheim's argument that Kamala was autistic was based on comparisons he made between Kamala and autistic children he worked with at the O School. Bettelheim stated that most of these children were "children of intelligent, educated parents, reared in middle-class homes" thus emphasizing their "normality" at least by the standards of the readers of the American Journal of Sociology. Despite this claim his primary example of a "wild child" at the O School was Anna, whose tumultuous early life as a hidden child and refugee Bettelheim described in detail in both "Feral Children and Autistic Children" and The Empty Fortress. 75 As was common in Bettelheim's case histories, he spent a significant amount of time discussing Anna's family background and her early childhood experiences. Bettelheim recounted that "Anna's life began in a dugout under a farmer's house in Poland, where her Jewish parents were hiding from the Germans, who were trying to exterminate all Jews. Her parents were ill mated." 76 These two sentences set the tone for the rest of the account which focused at once on Anna's parents' desperate circumstances in the face of Nazi persecution and on their fraught personal dynamics.

Bettelheim argued that Anna's supposed wildness was the result of her parents' marital struggles, particularly Anna's mothers supposed rejection of Anna and Anna's father. Bettelheim explained that Anna's father had courted her mother for years but that she had continuously rejected him. After having lost most of her family to Nazi genocide she was compelled to take refuge with him in his dugout to escape persecution. Bettelheim claimed that Anna's mother believed her father "to be beneath her." She had in fact "rejected him for years" before the German occupation. 77 It was only after "most of her family was killed" by the Germans that "Very much against her will she took refuge with the father in his hole under the ground." 78 Anna's mother told Bettelheim that Anna's father threatened to "kick her out of their refuge" if she did not have sex with him, a claim Anna's father denied. 79

After the war ended, Anna's parents travelled to a displacement camp. Bettelheim reported that Anna's mother engaged in "illicit relations," which Anna's father responded violently to. Anna was frequently present during these altercations. 80 Anna's father claimed that after the war ended Anna's mother "had no use for Anna or for him (Anna's father)." 81 Bettelheim concludes his account of Anna's early life by quoting Anna's father who claimed that "she (Anna's mother) only betrayed me." 82 It was this supposed indifference that Bettelheim pinpointed as the source of Anna's autism. Bettelheim presented Anna's mother as having failed to embody her proper role as a wife and mother. For Bettelheim, the fact that she actively rejected both roles, at least under the circumstances, emphasized her inhumanity. This inhumanity was then supposedly passed on to her daughter in the form of autism.

Despite what Bettelheim described as Anna's "unusual experiences in infancy," and the detailed description he provided of her parents struggles during the Holocaust he rejected the idea that these larger structural forms of violence were the cause of her autism. 83 He claimed that "it is simply due to chance that our two wildest girls were foreign-born and first saw the world in time of war. Thousands of children were born in DP camps and developed normally, and most of our autistic children were reared in what seemed like good middle-class homes." 84 Bettelheim instead argued that Anna's autism was caused by "deep inner rejection" and "total emotional isolation." 85 It was her parents' difficult relationship and their behavior toward Anna that supposedly made her "wild".

Bettelheim's account of Anna's family's experience tended to favor Anna's father who was literally given the last word on the matter. Anna's mother was presented as rejecting both Anna and her father, as indicated by statements like "the mother was willing to give Anna up because she wanted to live with her lover" and that "for over a year Anna's mother refused to live with her husband as man and wife. She rejected him because she felt him to be beneath her, culturally and socially, and repulsive physically." 86 Bettelheim's description of her traumatic experiences made it clear that Anna's mother was in some ways coerced into her marriage and into motherhood given her vulnerable status as a Jewish woman in hiding from Nazi genocide. Bettelheim even noted that it was only "very much against her will" that she joined Anna's father in the dugout. 87 Yet her resistance to these roles was framed as an example of her demanding and self-absorbed nature. Two pages later Bettelheim closed the article with the claim that "feral children seem to be produced not when wolves behave like mothers but when mothers behave like non-humans. The conclusion tentatively forced on us is that, while there are no feral children, there are some very rare examples of feral mothers, of human beings who become feral to one of their children." 88 According to Bettelheim Anna was made "feral" by her "feral mother".

Bettelheim is at this point infamous for his "mother-blaming," but it is important to note that he was participating in a much larger cultural phenomenon. The mid-twentieth century United States saw mothers being blamed for everything from racism to the rise of totalitarianism. 89 Anxieties about changing gender roles manifested in a proliferation of mother-blaming during WWII and in the post-war era. These fears were exemplified by works such as Philip Wylie's 1943 Generation of Vipers. Wylie's book attacked "Momism," the supposed domineering role of mothers in contemporary society. Critics condemned white middle-class women's increasing involvement in the workforce, arguing that these women were abandoning their proper roles as wives and mothers. 90

Bettelheim's condemnation of Anna's mother also calls to mind contentions about Jewish motherhood and Jewish womanhood both in central Europe, and amongst Jewish communities in the post-war United States. Bettelheim's readers, both Jewish and gentile, would have been familiar with the image of the demanding, self-absorbed Jewish women. By the late 1950s and certainly by the late 1960s when The Empty Fortress was published the stereotypical image of the nagging, materialistic and self-absorbed Jewish wife had become a staple of increasingly mainstream Jewish comedy. 91 Anna's father took up the equally common role of the emasculated, hard-working but ultimately disempowered Jewish husband and father at the mercy of his wife. 92 These two complementary images of Jewish gender "deviance" were critical to antisemitic portrayals of Jews in the 20^th century, both in the United States and in German speaking central Europe. 93 In both of these societies Jewish peoples' supposed deviation from acceptable middle-class gender norms marked them as other, as being unable to fully fit within gentile society.

As Karen Brodkin has shown many American Ashkenazi Jewish male writers and public intellectuals in the post-war era used critiques of Jewish women and particularly Jewish mothers to represent anxieties about the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity, and ambivalence towards models of white patriarchal domesticity that came with it. Brodkin has argued that in the post-war United States Ashkenazi Jewish communities developed a new definition of Jewishness that was "male centered" and "prefiguratively white." Ashkenazi Jewish women, particularly mothers, were used to embody a racialized Jewishness that some feared was not compatible with whiteness. Domesticating Jewish women (and Jewish men) to fit within white American patriarchal middle-class norms thus became a necessary step in the assimilation and whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish Americans for writers such as Philip Roth. 94

Griffin Epstein has drawn parallels between anxieties amongst American Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the post-war era about mothers transmitting their Jewishness to their children and the psychogenic model of autism. In both narratives mothers were framed as a source of contamination to their children. Epstein argues that:

"Bettelheim's obsession with separating children from their families, and in particular from their mothers, also appears to have roots in his personal history and anti-Jewish sentiments. In Bettelheim's philosophy, the specter of monstrosity associated with disability was displaced from the child to the mother. With the "blood logic" of matrilineal transmission of Jewishness, and the association of Jewishness and madness, it seems possible that the intention of displacing madness from the child to the mother is the effect of a concurrent displacement of racialized Jewishness from child to mother. "Refrigerator mothers" (and weak Jewish fathers) imbued their children with both psychosis and Jewishness." 95

Epstein theorizes that Bettelheim used the rhetoric of autism to de-pathologize and whiten Jewish American identity. Madness, which had previously been viewed as an innate feature of Jewishness, became reframed as the result of maternal gender deviance. Epstein's theories parallel Sander Gilman's claims that Freud used psychoanalysis as a means of de-pathologizing Jewish identity by claiming that traits like anxiety, neuroses and psychosis that had previously been associated with inherent biological Jewish pathology were universal experiences that had their roots in gender deviance. 96

It is also important to note that Anna and her parents were Polish Eastern European Jews. Scholars have argued that amongst assimilated German speaking Jews of Bettelheim's generation, Eastern European Jews were often portrayed as the ethnic and cultural "other" that assimilated Western European Jews could measure themselves against. 97 In his writing on antisemitism in Austria, Bruce F. Pauley noted that "westernized" Austrian Jews viewed newly arrived Eastern European Jews, or Ostjuden as "loud, coarse, dirty, immoral, and culturally backwards…they were seen as apparitions from an earlier period of Jewish history the assimilated Jews wanted to forget." 98 Bettelheim's 1969 book Children of the Dream where he compares Eastern European Jewish founders of Kibbutz life in Israel with their children who were raised in Israel offers some insight into his views of Eastern European Jews. He claimed that while the founders of Kibbutz were "mainly Jews of Eastern Europe" their children lacked "interest in [their parent's] ghetto values and attitudes" and did not exhibit "those features that marked Eastern Jewry," such as "deep feelings openly shown, often histrionically displayed." 99 It seems possible that to Bettelheim Ostjuden, like Anna and her family, represented an ethnic "Eastern" other.

Bettelheim did not discuss Anna's treatment or weave a narrative of rehabilitation or cure for her. Rather he claimed that "Since we are here concerned with the background of so-called feral children, and since Anna was recognizably both wild and autistic when about five or six years old, nothing more needs to be said here of her story." 100 Anna's future was portrayed as being unimportant, which contrasts with Bettelheim's emphasis on cure in other case studies, including Joey's, and in his discussions about the O School more generally. 101 Descriptions of Anna's time at the O School were limited to references to her supposedly wild traits such as a staff member's comment that, "As I watched her continual application of saliva to all parts of her body, her biting and chewing of her toes, I thought to myself, 'She is an animal, destructively washing herself'." 102 Within Bettelheim's narrative Anna was unable or unwilling to assimilate to white, Protestant, middle-class society, and thus she was unable to attain full humanity. She was only useful as a cautionary tale and as a contrast to the assimilation/cure/rehabilitation narrative of the "mechanical boy."

Joey the Mechanical Boy:

In contrast to these narratives of failed assimilation, the narrative of cure exemplified by Joey the "mechanical boy" was Bettelheim's ultimate example of the rehabilitative power of the O School. The O School's influence was itself premised both on Bettelheim's own expertise and on the curative power of middle-class, white, American, Christian, patriarchal norms. Bettelheim contrasted this idealized white, Protestant, middle-class family environment provided by the O School with the students' supposedly pathological and deviant home environments. In The Empty Fortress and the article in Scientific American, Joey was racially unmarked in a way that would have led readers to perceive him as white. In both texts, Bettelheim claimed that Joey had been "robbed of his humanity" and made into a "human machine" by his parents', particularly his mother's, lack of interest in him. 103 Bettelheim claimed that "The conditions of life that made Joey decide to be a mechanical contrivance instead of a person began before he was born. At birth, his mother "thought of him as a thing rather than a person"." 104 Bettelheim presented Joey's mother as the primary agent of his dehumanization.

What did it mean for Joey to be a mechanical boy? What made Joey a mechanical boy? Bettelheim explained that Joey was fascinated by machines. He built elaborate apparatuses with radio tubes, light bulbs, paper and pieces of string, and other odds and ends. Joey believed that these apparatuses were necessary to control his bodily functions. He also built an elaborate apparatus around his bed to "live" him or keep his body functioning during the night. At various points he would explode yelling "crash," jumping around and hurling pieces of his apparatuses around until they broke. 105 It seems fair to say that Joey himself had some role in constructing the narrative of himself as a mechanical boy. Yet it is also important to recognize Bettelheim as the author of the "Mechanical Boy" narrative that found its way to publication.

Unlike Kamala and Anna, Joey and his family are presented as being "curable." To use Jasbir Puar's terms Joey's bodymind was one that could be "reinvigorated for neoliberalism" and was "valuable enough for rehabilitation." 106 While Joey begins the narrative in a supposed state of dehumanization having been in Bettelheim's words "robbed of his humanity," his status as other was less complete, and less permanent than those of his counterparts. 107 Bettelheim and the "good mothering figures" in the form of the counselors at the O School were able to bring Joey into the "human condition." 108 Even Joey's "otherness" was presented as being less "alien" than that of his counterparts. Bettelheim directly contrasted Joey's mechanical inhumanity with the inhumanity of "feral" autistic children. He claimed that Joey was not "as subhuman as other autistic youngsters who, because of their ferocity and wildness, had been likened to animals and called feral children. His was not a reduced human existence or an animal-like one. He was "real," all right, but his reality was that of machines." 109 Bettelheim privileged Joey's mechanical "inhumanity" which he described as both "fascinating and frightening" over the "inhumanity" of other autistic children, particularly "feral children" like Kamala. 110 This was likely because Joey's mechanical inhumanity was associated with white masculinist modernity, whereas Kamala's feral inhumanity was associated with racialized and feminized primitivism. 111

Bettelheim believed that the nature of Joeys' "delusions" reflected deeper social anxieties of the age. He noted that "man's delusions in a machine world seem to be tokens of both our hopes and our fears of what machines may do for us, or to us. In this sense, Joey's story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale." 112 Joey's "delusions," though extreme, were ultimately portrayed as relatable to readers. Unlike Kamala, Joey and his family are framed as being legible and relatable to Scientific American's assumed audience of middle-class white technocrats. 113 While Bettelheim claimed that the idea that Kamala was a wolf girl was primitive, he framed Joey's delusions as being deeply rooted in the contemporary moment. The idea of the wolf girl was presented as a relic of a less "civilized" past. The image of the mechanical boy was presented as a symbol of the peril and potential of a new modernity.

That the narrative of the mechanical boy was not simply a cautionary tale is clear from looking at where the article was originally published. It appeared in the March 1959 issue of Scientific American, a periodical that unabashedly celebrated not only scientific advancement but the rise of the technocratic class. Alongside their scientific articles the magazine featured advertisements for the latest industrial technologies made by Lockheed, General Motors, Teflon, and the Union Carbide Corporation, all of which promised a new world of possibility. 114 Scientific American projected a positive and positivist view of U.S. society and its future in which science was the solution, not the problem. "Joey: a 'Mechanical Boy'" was part of this vision. A 1967 advertisement for Scientific American mentions the article as one that would appeal to the magazine's readership of "research scientists, engineers and technically sophisticated executives who are bringing U.S. industry under new management." 115 The mechanical boy was presented not as a challenge to this technocracy, and technocratic masculinity but as another problem that had been solved by the curious, restless and energetic scientists who comprised the magazine's readers and contributors.

Bettelheim argued that Joey's obsession with machines was the result of Joey and his parents' desires for Joey to be at once more and less than human. Bettelheim claimed that Joey believed that machines were better than humans. Joey compared his own bodily and mental capacity to that of machines and found himself wanting. When Joey almost injured himself kicking a pipe he apparently proclaimed "That proves it. Machines are better than the body. They don't break; they're much harder and stronger." When Joey forgot something, he used it as evidence that his "brain ought to be thrown away and replaced by machinery." 116 Bettelheim implied that Joey's preference for machines, while undesirable, was not entirely irrational. In fact, Joey's statements about the superiority of machines to the human body were similar to those made in advertisements featured in Scientific American. An ad in the May 1959 issue boasted of a "rugged" "Mechanical Arm [that] Does A Super Man's Job in Areas Where Ordinary Man Cannot Go." 117 Similarly, in the next issue an ad for ""Scotch" Brand Magnetic Tape" featured a picture of their product overlaid across a model of a human head next to a tagline that praised the products' "magnetic memory of a computer's 'Fast Talk'." In smaller text it continued "Done in days-the calculations that might take the human brain months! To speed its work, the computer draws on a perfect memory." 118 The tone of these ads was triumphant, celebrating the achievements of the automated age. Machines are presented as both a triumph of and a source of a new kind of invigorating technical, modern (white) masculinity. Joey's delusions thus somewhat aligned with Scientific American's and various corporations' visions of mechanized, masculinist modernity.

Bettelheim did play on anxieties about the supposedly depersonalizing nature of post-war modernity/mass society, though. He drew connections between Joey's behavior and the larger society Joey lived in. Bettelheim argued that "It is unlikely that Joey's calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own." 119 Bettelheim, himself an immigrant from Austria who had come to the United States fleeing Nazi persecution, did not clarify what specific culture he was referring to. Still, his reference to "our society of mechanized plenty" later in the same paragraph indicated that it was tied up in ideas of western modernity, and likely to the supposedly post-scarcity world of the post-war United States. 120 This implied that Joey was transformed into a machine by a culture that worshiped mechanical efficiency over human emotions and personal relationships. This was made explicit in Bettelheim's statement that "by treating him (Joey) mechanically his parents made him a machine." 121 Bettelheim also argued that Joey's "delusions" were not merely an individual issue but rather that "his (Joey's) story has a general relevance to the understanding of emotional development in a machine age." 122 Joey was thus presented as a product of and potentially a martyr to western modernity.

Yet, Joey's mechanized nature was not portrayed solely as a negative. There was a sense of potential in Bettelheim's narrative about Joey. This potential existed not only in spite of but because of Joey's supposed roboticness. In first describing Joey, Bettelheim noted that "A human body that functions as if it were a machine and a machine that duplicates human functions are equally fascinating and frightening." 123 Joey's mechanized nature was portrayed as terrifying, but it was also desirable in some ways. It posed both a challenge and an opportunity to those observing him. Bettelheim claimed that "To do justice to Joey I would have to compare him simultaneously to a most inept infant and a highly complex piece of machinery." 124 Joey straddled the line between human dependency and mechanical self-sufficiency. He was both more and less than human, the dream, and the nightmare of the post-war "machine age."

Joey's status as a "mechanical boy" exists alongside and was implicitly contrasted with the stereotype of the Asian/Asian American as automaton. Drawing on ideas of techno-orientalism, Long T. Bui has argued that from the mid-19^th century onward Americans have often viewed Asians and Asian Americans through the lens of the "model machine myth." The model machine myth holds that Asians and Asian Americans functioned as quasi-human automatons who were (un)naturally suited for performing difficult labor but lacked the true spirit, and creativity of their white counterparts. 125 There were two things that primarily differentiated the idea of the "mechanical boy" from the model machine myth's Asian (as) automaton. The first was that Bettelheim emphasized Joey's creativity, and Joey's role in the creation of the concept of the "mechanical boy." From the beginning of his 1959 article Bettelheim acknowledged Joey's role in framing himself as a "mechanical boy," noting that Joey "functioned as if…run by machines of his own powerfully creative fantasy." 126 Bettelheim held that Joey chose to become a mechanical boy because he found being a human in his home environment to be unbearable. This focus on Joey's creativity and agency in turning himself into a "mechanical boy" contrasted sharply with the image of the Asian (as) automaton who lacked creativity and independent thought. Joey was not portrayed merely as a machine but as an artificer, a creator of machines. The other primary difference was that Joey's status as a "mechanical boy" was shown to be changeable/curable. Bettelheim assured readers that by the time he left the O School Joey "ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child." 127 Not only did Bettelheim portray Joey as curable but Bettelheim presented Joey as playing a role in his own cure. In contrast, within the model machine myth, Asians and Asian Americans are portrayed as mere mimics of humans, their mechanization being ultimately inherent and inescapable. 128 Bettelheim claimed that Joey had been "robbed" of his rightful humanity, but Asians and Asian Americans were not viewed as possessing the same level of inherent humanity. At least narratively, Joey was granted agency and a capacity for self-fashioning that was denied to Asians and Asian Americans who were viewed as model machines. It was this capacity for agency and self-fashioning that made Joey a model of white technocratic masculinity.

Importantly, as in his writing about Anna, Bettelheim did not argue that mechanized society was the direct cause of Joey's supposed illness. Rather he argued that Joey's condition was caused by his parents, and particularly his mother's emotional negligence. In discussing Joey's toilet training Bettelheim claimed that "Joey's parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself." 129 Joey's parents, and particularly his mother, were accused of both dehumanizing and objectifying Joey.

In the post-war era, men often used the image of a middle-class housewife, enthralled by the capitalistic conveniences of modern life and making impossible demands on her offspring, to express ambivalence about America's new society of consumption. This was particularly true amongst Jewish male cultural commentators, from sociologists to comedians who projected their ambivalence about the pressure to enter the American middle-class both economically and culturally onto Jewish women. 130 Jewish women were accused of excessive consumption. Joey's mother was not presented as being Jewish, rather Bettelheim took what was often portrayed as a failing of Jewish women in particular and presented it as a potential fault of all white middle-class American women, one that could have devastating effects on their children.

Crucially, if mothers or mothering figures did their job correctly, then the "mechanical boy" could be transformed into a productive member of the automated society that Bettelheim initially appeared critical of. The threats of the "machine age" did not stem from any inherent dangers caused by technology. The issue was that individuals, and particularly women, had not adjusted to these changes properly. The importance of creating economically viable independent actors to the O School's mission can be seen in the way that Bettelheim measured Joey's success. In 1959 when a letter writer questioned whether Joey had truly been cured Bettelheim responded that Joey should be considered cured because he was currently attending high school. 131 Already Joey's recovery was being measured by his integration into "productive" social institutions. Even more telling, in The Empty Fortress Bettelheim ended Joey's case study by recounting a visit that Joey made to the O School three years after he left. Bettelheim noted that what most impressed him about Joey, more than Joey's own accounts of "his present ability to manage" (in which Joey emphasized his growing ability to make friends on his own) were two objects that Joey brought with him. The objects were his high school diploma and a rectifier (a device that converts alternating current to direct current) that he had made. Bettelheim claimed that the rectifier had symbolic significance as it showed that Joey's life has changed from the continuous back and forth of the alternating current to the straight-forward direct encounter of direct current. 132 Still, it seems unlikely that Bettelheim would have been as impressed if Joey had excitedly presented him with a picture of a rectifier or one that he had not made. It was these physical signs of Joey's productivity that ultimately cemented for Bettelheim the thoroughness of his recovery. The ultimate sign of Joey's recovery lay in his ability to adopt the trappings of white technocratic masculinity, including education and technical proficiency, while still adhering to social norms.

A psychoanalyst at heart, Bettelheim was an expert in transforming larger societal problems into individual familial melodramas. At first glance Bettelheim's narrative seems to offer a critique of modern industrialized "Western" society, but while Bettelheim situated Joey's case within the post-war U.S.'s impersonalized society of automated plenty, Joey's problems were ultimately caused by his mother's emotional neglect. These problems were then solved by removing Joey from his initial "pathological" home and inserting him into the warm embrace of the O School where Bettelheim served as the authoritative father and a cadre of female counselors served as "good mothers" who dedicated their full time and attention to providing a nurturing and permissive environment. 133 The idealized home environment provided by the O School was inherently upper middle-class, Christian and white. The areas of the O School that were open to the public were lavishly furnished with expensive paintings and fine furniture. Students drank from glasses with the University of Chicago insignia on them. 134 Bettelheim emphasized the celebration of Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas. Bettelheim specifically emphasized the importance of Easter with its themes of renewal and rebirth in student's recovery process. 135 The school maintained a system of de facto segregation under Bettelheim, only accepting white students. 136 Furthermore in 1955 yearly tuition at the O School was $4,500 dollars, which certainly helped to assure that most of the students at the school came from relatively prosperous families. 137 It was this idealized upper middle-class, white, Protestant, patriarchal familial environment that Bettelheim claimed would not only cure Joey and his fellow students but prepare them to thrive in the "modern" world.

The image of the "mechanical boy" can be read as an amalgamation of the stereotype of the "mechanistic Jew" that arose in German speaking Europe in the late 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, and post-war U.S. ambivalence towards technological advances. The stereotype of the "mechanistic Jew" served as a means of projecting German speaking European gentiles' anxieties about industrialization and the spread of mechanistic and rationalist thinking in the sciences in the late 19^th and early 20^th century onto their favorite scape goats, Jewish people. It associated Jews with machines, framing both as soulless forces that endangered the "spirit" of German speaking gentiles. Anne Harrington argues that by the 1920s in Germany and Austria, Jews were increasingly identified as both "cause and as flesh-and-blood instantiation" of all the worst values of soulless, mechanistic science. 138 David Nirenberg has argued that from the enlightenment onwards critics of social change often held up Jewish people as the epitome of what was wrong with the modern world. Jewish people were attacked for being hyperrational and mechanistic. 139 Gilman has noted that in German speaking Europe in the first half of the 20^th-century medical professionals generally held that the Jewish mind and Jewish thought were inherently different from that of gentiles. Jewish people were considered to be less creative, more pathological and lacking in true intellectual vigor when compared to their gentile counterparts. 140

Bettelheim, who spent the first thirty years of his life in Vienna, would likely have been familiar with these stereotypes. The narrative of Bettelheim transforming Joey from a "mechanical boy" to a human child can be read as a subversion of this narrative of the "mechanistic Jew." Drawing on Sander Gilman's argument that Freud used psychoanalysis to transmute stereotypes of Jewish "pathology" into universal issues of gender deviance, this article argues that Bettelheim used Joey's story as a means of universalizing the image of the "mechanistic Jew." Yet, while Gilman presents this universalization as deracializing, I argue that Bettelheim's universalizing of the image of the "mechanistic Jew" contributed to the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. 141

While the stereotype of the "mechanistic Jew" was entirely negative, American attitudes towards the new "mechanized" society they inhabited were markedly ambivalent. This ambivalence can be seen in Bettelheim's portrayal of Joey. As Bettelheim phrased it, Joey's situation was equally "fascinating and frightening." 142 Joey was at once filled with immense potential and hindered by immense burdens, he was likened in the same sentence both to the "most inept infant" and the "most highly complex piece of machinery." 143 Bettelheim at once played on post-war anxieties about automation, mechanization, and modernity in general and painted a strangely alluring picture of the potential of this new era. 144 Bettelheim offered up a story of the white middle-class autistic boy as the threat and fantasy of a body of political and economic thought that centered the individual as an independent rational actor. 145

Bettelheim's narrative of "Joey the Mechanical Boy" served to at once universalize, whiten, and cure/rehabilitate the image of the mechanistic Jew. Bettelheim's narrative framed both Joey and Bettelheim himself as the rehabilitated/assimilated poster child for new images of white technocratic masculinity. Bettelheim used an inverted version of the idea of the mechanistic Jew to render (male) Ashkenazi Jews as the epitome of a new type of technocratic masculinity. Under this new model of technocratic masculinity, white masculine privileges were portrayed as entitlements earned through hyper adaptation to modern, mechanized, capitalist society. Bettelheim was only able to do so by contrasting the newly whitened, masculinized Ashkenazi Jew with the image of the abject and dehumanized racial other, either the wolf girl, the wild child, or the "moslem" concentration camp inmate.

Conclusion:

Like Freud, Bettelheim also reframed pathologies that had been associated with inherent racial difference as the result of a failure to adapt to gender roles. In Bettelheim's case it was the mother who had failed to embody the ideal of white, Protestant, middle-class, motherhood. Bettelheim thus rendered the "problems" of Jewish people and autistic people as "curable" with the cure being rehabilitation/assimilation into the white, middle-class, Protestant family. Women in general took on the pathologies/pathologizing influence that had been associated with the Jewish woman/mother. It was only through assimilation into an idealized white, middle-class "milieu" that autistic children could be "cured." This cure was meant to mold them into the productive citizens demanded by a society that was more invested than ever in the futures of white, middle-class boys. Bettelheim's work served as a means of both addressing anxieties about the "crisis of (white) masculinity" that characterized the post-war era and of whitening Ashkenazi Jewish identity in the United States. The stories of Kamala, Anna, Joey and the "moslem" concentration camp inmates served as morality tales that demonstrated the supposed interdependence of humanity, whiteness, ablemindedness, and white, Christian, heteronormative, gender roles.