Lauretta Bender (August 9, 1897 – January 4, 1987) was an American child neuropsychiatrist known for developing the Bender-Gestalt Test.
Early life Bender was born in Butte, Montana, to parents John Oscar and Katherine Irvine Bender. Bender had a difficult time in school when she was young and had to repeat the first grade three times. She often reversed her letters when reading and writing which led people to believe she had some form of intellectual disability. Her father helped her compensate for her dyslexia and she often credited him for making her a strong individual. Her family moved often and she attended high school in Los Angeles where she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class.
Education Bender earned a BA in 1922 and MA in 1923 from the University of Chicago. She completed her M.D. at State University of Iowa Medical School in 1926 (now the University of Iowa), and this is where she wrote her first scientific publication, Hematological studies on experimental tuberculosis of the guinea pig. After graduation, she spent some time studying overseas, completed an internship at the University of Chicago and conducted research at Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Bender completed internships and residencies at Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago, the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the University of Amsterdam, and the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and held a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship that took her to Holland. When she returned to the United States she worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Because she was not trained as a psychologist, but rather as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, most of her work focused on diagnosing mental disorders in children.
Personal life Bender met Paul Schilder M.D., PhD (1886–1940) at Johns Hopkins Hospital while writing a publication with him. Schilder was a psychoanalyst from Vienna at the same time as famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. While working together, Bender and Schilder fell in love. Schilder was already married and eleven years older than Bender. In 1930 Bender moved to New York with Schilder. They were married in 1936 after Schilder was divorced. Bender and Schilder had three children together before Schilder was hit by a car and killed. After his death, Bender continued to translate and publish his work. Bender did not remarry until the age of 70 to Henry B. Parkes, PhD. Parkes was a history professor at New York University. He died in 1973, five years after their marriage.
Career Bender began working at Bellevue Hospital in 1930 after she relocated there with Schilder. She was awarded the position of senior psychiatrist at the Children's Psychiatric Division in 1934, and remained in the position for 21 years. Though her work is used in psychology today, Bender was a psychiatrist and neuropathologist. Most of her work was in diagnosing mental disorders in children. She occasionally worked with certain therapies and used these in her diagnoses. Most of her work involved abandoned children or children whose parents felt that there was something wrong with their child. During the Golden Age of comic books in the post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s, she worked as an advisor of National Comics (now DC Comics) earning $150 per month. In 1954, she testified on behalf of National Comics to defend the industry as a medical expert on children. She also served as the head of the children's psychiatric service at Bellevue Hospital for 21 years starting in 1934. In 1954, she testified at the Senate Subcommittee of Juvenile Delinquency hearings on the effects of crime and horror comic books as a medical expert for National Comics with a job as an advisor for the company.
Bender and race Unlike many other psychiatrists and psychologists at the time, Bender spent little time considering race as a factor for differences in mental abilities. It was a common belief that African American people were at a lower level of evolution than their Caucasian counterparts. Some of Bender's writings seem to contradict each other; some state that there were significant racial differences, and others state that there is little to no difference in race among children. It is believed, however, that the publications she released regarding the races being evolutionarily different were actually her late husband's work and that she left them unaltered as a form of respect. There is some evidence that even though she rarely wrote about race and racial differences, she may not have ruled out racial primitivity. At the time, Bender was considered an expert in the psychology of African-American children because most of the children at Bellevue were African American. Although she documented race when conducting her research, she often divided the differences in race into two categories: functional (significant differences that influence behavior) and non-functional (differences have no significant impact on behavior). In short, she believed that there were differences in the races, and some made a difference while others did not. Bender used the word "primitive" to describe French Guinean natives and used the term "civilized" to refer to African Americans. Describing African Americans as "civilized" was not the norm at the time. Bender explained that "primitive" did not mean intellectually different, and that to her it described those who were not exposed to the same education and culture as those she considered "civilized". Though not a Gestaltist, Bender believed that all people are made up of a sum of their parts, and that race was only one factor in what made a person who they are.
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