Lauretta Bender

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

Contents 1 Early Life 2 Work in Reading Disability 3 Work in Language Disability 4 Bender-Gestalt Test

[edit] Early Life

Bender’s interests in the development of language disorders began when she was in third grade, around the age of eight. Apparently because her handwriting was so poorly made and reading was so slow she wasn’t considered a bright student. Because of these facts, school authorities deemed her slightly retarded, forcing her to go back to second grade where she belonged. Luckily her father stepped in and stopped this move, as he was aware that Lauretta’s reading and writing skills needed support, not punishment. From this situation, Lauretta had a vested interest in specific learning problems and their cause.

[edit] Work in Reading Disability

Bender's condition allowed her to witness the problems facing children with language disabilities as well as become aware of their need for a specialized teaching philosophy. Lauretta recognized that “children with leaning disorders were best understood as suffering from a biologically determined disorder^[1]. By this statement, 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 ones resulting from poor social experiments at critical times of language development; however, Bender strongly felt that there was a genetic factor to some reading disabilities.

Having received her B.S. and M.A. in biology from the University of Chicago and an M.D. from Iowa State, Bender viewed reading disabilities as evolving from a basic biological unevenness in maturation revealed the reading disability itself to be but the tip of the iceberg. Bender claimed that “children with various biological problems have a number of common problems," including:
1.difficulties in patterned behavior in impulse, motor, perceptual and integrative areas
2.A severe anxiety, also poorly patterned, with associated body image and identification problems
3.A great need for human support in relation to these areas.

From this list, Bender - with help from Paul Schilder – states 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.

[edit] Work in Language Disability

While 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 disability as a spectrum from most to least severe, with reading disability occupying the least severe end of the spectrum and with language problems of autism and schizophrenic children on the other. While she does receive criticism for this claim, the core of it states that just as specific reading disability was considered a biologically developed deviation, so autism and schizophrenia were considered maturity lags biologically determined. She doesn’t imply that the causes of the afflictions are the same, but instead that their connection lay in the common symptoms of specific language dysfunctions.

Theoretically, Butler attempted to understand the vulnerability of the language function to all the developmental disorders. She felt that as the most recently acquired function of the human brain, the central. 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, saw that the learning problem was only one symptom of the biological defect which affects other areas of behavior, impulse control, motor coordination, perception and integration, and understood that underlying the spectrum of deficits is basic dysfunction in special orientation and temporal organization. This understanding has been used to devise programs to prevent learning disorders. On top of this, Bender also incorporated social factors in contributing to language delay. Clearly her efforts contributed a wealth of knowledge in the field of learning disorders, knowledge still called upon and serving as foundation for many different pedagogies.

[edit] Bender-Gestalt Test

Main article: Bender-Gestalt Test

She is best known for her Visual Motor Gestalt Test described in a 1938 monograph. She worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York City from 1930–1956. In 1938 Lauretta Bender wrote a Monograph entitled: A Visual Motor Gestalt Test and Its Clinical Use. The test consists of reproducing 9 figures that are printed on cards. The figures were derived from the work of the famous Gestalt psychologist Wertheimer. The Bender-Gestalt test as it is now often called, is typically among the top five test used by clinical psychologists. It measures perceptual motor skills, perceptual motor development and gives an indication of neuroloical intactness. It has been used a personality test and a test of emotional problems.

Scoring systems include:

• Elizabeth M. Koppitz's system for Children (1963)
• Pascal & Suttell system for Adults (1951);
• Hutt & Briskin Projective personality feature system (1960);
• Arthur Canter's Background Interference Procedure (BIP) test for organicty (1976)

Patrica Lacks uses it 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." Bender was a contemporary of David Wechsler, Ph.D., creator of the famous intelligence tests. Wechsler was Chief Psychologist at Bellevue Hospital.