Throughout his long life, Bruno Bettelheim was a fighter. Gruff, outspoken, argumentative, stubborn, he was ready to do battle with just about anybody about anything. World famous for his innovative treatment of autistic children, he once declared that most "expert advice" about children is "nonsense." A lifelong liberal, he denounced the radicals of the 1960s as neo-Nazis. A former concentration-camp prisoner, he provoked outrage by writing that Europe's Jews had not done enough to resist the Holocaust. Bettelheim's argument: "All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know they are in the right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done but because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision."

Born in Vienna in 1903, Bettelheim had just completed his doctorate in psychology and his studies with Sigmund Freud, when Nazi Germany marched into Austria. Bettelheim was beaten and hauled off to spend a year in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. Released in 1939, he went to the U.S. and found work teaching first at Rockford College, then at the University of Chicago.

Bettelheim said later he had survived the concentration camps partly by studying and analyzing other prisoners. He saw that the guards systematically tried to break down the prisoners' identity, their sense of value and meaning. He was one of the very first to describe that process in a widely reprinted article, "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" (1943). No less important, he got the idea that he could treat supposedly incurable autistic children by reversing the Buchenwald process, taking intensive care of them and restoring their sense of themselves. "As an educator and therapist of severely disturbed children," he wrote in The Uses of Enchantment (1976), his prizewinning study of fairy tales, "my main task was to restore meaning to their lives."

The University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, which Bettelheim headed from 1944 to 1972, gave him a chance to put his theories into practice. Taking in 30 or more children, he kept them in what he called a "therapeutic milieu," with counselors treating them around the clock rather than during limited visits. He claimed that more than 85% of his patients achieved "full return to participation in life."

Bettelheim wrote prolifically and passionately about his school and his theories: Love Is Not Enough (1950), Truants from Life (1955), The Empty Fortress (1967). But a number of critics charged that his claims of cures were exaggerated. They also attacked some of his theories, notably his guilt-inducing accusation that childhood schizophrenia could often be blamed on "schizophrenic mothers." Relenting somewhat, Bettelheim declared in A Good Enough Parent (1987), "There are no perfect parents and no perfect children, but every parent can be good enough."

Bettelheim had written extensively about the concentration camps in The Informed Heart (1960), but he could not get over the experience. "He told me that once you were in a camp, you could never escape the cruelty," said a colleague, Rudolph Ekstein. In Surviving, and Other Essays (1979), Bettelheim asked a painful question: "What of the horrible nightmares about the camps which every so often awaken me today, 35 years later, despite a most rewarding life...?"

And life seemed less rewarding lately. Bettelheim was greatly afflicted by the death in 1984 of his wife of 43 years, Gertrud. In 1987 he suffered a stroke that impaired his ability to write. Six weeks ago, he moved out of his comfortable beach-front apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., and into a retirement home outside Washington, which he apparently found unsatisfactory. Last week, at 86, the healer of sick children decided that his struggles had gone on long enough. He took some pills, then pulled a plastic bag over his head and lay quiet until he died.

By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York.