Lauretta Bender

Lauretta Bender

Lauretta Bender, M.D. (1897–1987) was a child neuropsychiatrist, best known as the creator of

the Bender-Gestalt Test.

Early life

Bender began to be interested in the development of language disorders and learning problems, and their causes, when she was in third grade, around the age of eight. Because her handwriting was so poor and her reading was so slow, she was considered by school authorities to be slightly retarded, and they attempted to force her to go back to second grade. Her father, however, prevented this move, as he was aware that Lauretta’s reading and writing skills needed support, not punishment.^{[citation needed]}

Education and career

Bender received B.S. and M.A. degrees in biology from the University of Chicago and an M.D. from Iowa State University. She worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York City from 1930 to 1956.

Electroshock therapy on children

While at Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to 100 children, (among them was Ted Chabasinski, now a human rights activist).

"Bender, who shocked 100 children, the youngest of whom was 3, abandoned the use of ECT in the 1950s. She is best known as the co-developer of a widely used neuropsychological test that bears her name, not as a pioneer in the use of ECT on children. That work was discredited by researchers who found that the children she treated either showed no improvement or got worse."

Work in reading disability

Bender became aware of the need for a specialized teaching philosophy applicable to children with language disabilities. She recognized that children with learning disorders were best understood as suffering from a biologically determined disorder. She believed that there was “a functional defect of the maturation of those areas...needed for the development of language, considered in its broadest sense” (24). She felt that, although there were many possible reasons for the maturational delays, such as those resulting from poor social experiments at critical times of language development, there was a genetic factor underlying some reading disabilities.

Bender viewed reading disabilities as evolving from a basic biological unevenness in maturation. She believed the reading disability itself to be but a manifestation of a more fundamental condition. Bender claimed that “children with various biological problems have a number of common problems", including: difficulties in patterned behavior in impulse, motor, perceptual and integrative areas; severe anxiety, also poorly patterned, with associated body image and identification problems; and a great need for human support in relation to these areas.^{[citation needed]}

With the help of Paul Schilder, Bender developed the thesis that many of the language problems facing children with reading disabilities may have as their basis difficulty with the temporal ordering of sequences in a series of hierarchies of organization. Such ordering and hierarchical sequences include the organization of phonemes in words, words in a sentence, and sentences within paragraphs.^{[citation needed]}

Work in language disability

Although Bender focused mainly on reading disability, she also spent a great deal of time working in the broad field of language disability. She viewed developmental language disabilities as occurring along a spectrum from least to most severe, with reading disability occupying the least severe end of the spectrum and the language problems of autism and schizophrenia occupying the other. Although her views in this matter have been criticized, they essentially posit that autism and schizophrenia are biologically determined lags in maturity, just as reading disability is a biologically developed deviation. Bender does not imply that the causes of the afflictions are the same, but instead that their connection lies in the common symptoms of specific language dysfunctions.^{[citation needed]}

Bender attempted to understand the vulnerability of the language function to all the developmental disorders. She recognized the biological nature of a group of learning disorders for which there was no clinical evidence of structural damage to the central nervous system. She also understood that the learning problem was only one symptom of the biological defect which affects other areas of behavior, such as impulse control, motor coordination, perception and integration, and that underlying the spectrum of deficits is basic dysfunction in special orientation and temporal organization. Bender also incorporated social factors contributing to language delay.^{[citation needed]}

Bender's research has been used to devise programs to prevent learning disorders. Her efforts contributed a wealth of knowledge in the field of learning disorders that is still called upon and serves as a foundation for many different pedagogies.^{[citation needed]}

Bender-Gestalt Test

Main article: Bender-Gestalt Test

Bender is best known for her Visual Motor Gestalt Test described in her 1938 monograph, A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use. The test consists of reproducing nine figures that are printed on cards. The figures were derived from the work of the famous Gestalt psychologist, Max Wertheimer. The Bender-Gestalt test, as it is now often called, was typically among the top five test used by clinical psychologists. It was considered to be a measure of perceptual motor skills and perceptual motor development and gives an indication of neurological intactness. Underlying the use of this test was Lauretta Bender's false argument that a single measure that assesses gestalt could potentially identify brain damage. In the past two decades studies have repeatedly shown that the B-G is not sensitive to the identification of brain damage or emotional problems. It is therefore rarely taught or used by clinical psychologists.

Scoring systems include:

• Elizabeth M. Koppitz's system for children (1963)
• Pascal and Suttell system for adults (1951)
• Hutt and Briskin projective personality feature system (1960)
• Arthur Canter's Background Interference Procedure (BIP) test for organicity (1976)

Patrica Lacks uses the BGT test as a screening device for brain damage. Bender herself said it was "a method of evaluating maturation of gestalt functioning children 4-11's brain functioning by which it responds to a given constellation of stimuli as a whole, the response being a motor process of patterning the perceived gestalt."

Gestalt therapy is a separate and distinct science from the Visual Motor Gestalt Test. The name "Bender-Gestalt Test" derives its name from an adaptation of the figures from Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.^{[citation needed]}

"Childhood Schizophrenia" LSD-25 Experiments

"From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with “autistic schizophrenia.” In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her."

The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA’s Experiments on Children August 12, 2010 posted by Michael Leon ·

See also

• Ted Chabasinski