Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children was published by Free Press in 1950, Bettelheim’s first book-length work. The title states the thesis: love alone — parental affection, therapeutic goodwill, the desire to help — is insufficient for the treatment of severely disturbed children. What is needed is a structured environment in which every detail of daily life is designed to support therapeutic progress.
Bettelheim walks the reader through a typical day at the Orthogenic School: the carefully managed waking routine (designed to avoid the anxiety that disturbed children often feel upon regaining consciousness), the meals (designed to provide both nutrition and social learning), the school activities (designed to engage without overwhelming), the free play (designed to allow the expression of emotions that cannot be verbalized), and the bedtime routine (designed to manage the terror of sleep and abandonment that plagued many of the children).
The book’s influence on residential treatment programs worldwide was enormous. Bettelheim demonstrated that the “milieu” — the total environment — was itself the primary therapeutic instrument, and that the staff’s task was not to perform therapy on children but to create a world in which therapeutic change could occur naturally. The approach was expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to replicate, but its results with the most severely disturbed children were often remarkable.
Collecting Love Is Not Enough
First edition (Free Press, Glencoe, IL, 1950): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good/very good: $15–$40