[Bruno Bettelheim] was 86 and died at the Charter House nursing home in Silver Spring, Md., said Jacquelyn Sanders, director of the University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for disturbed children. Bettelheim ran the school from 1944 to 1973, and was a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the university.

Born in Vienna to middle-class Jewish parents, he received his doctorate at the University of Vienna and studied under Sigmund Freud. The beloved and frequently quoted Bettelheim became a psychoanalyst who spent nearly 50 years exploring the mysteries of children's minds.

Trained in the incubator of psychoanalysis-Vienna-Bettelheim's first international notice came after his own brushes with death in the Dachau and Buchenwald camps. He had been sent there by the Nazis in 1938 after the takeover of Austria, but was released a year later, partly through the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had heard of his early work with autistic children.