Bettelheim, Bruno (1903-1990)

The psychoanalyst and educator Bruno Bettelheim was

born in Vienna on August 28, 1903, and died on March 13,
1990, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The son of a wood merchant from the assimilated

Jewish middle class, Bettelheim had to give up his studies
when his father died of syphilis. He was twenty-three and
remained scarred by his father's "shameful" death. He
returned to his studies in philosophy ten years later and in
February 1938 was one of the last Jews to earn a doctorate
at the University of Vienna before the Anschluss. His thesis
was entitled "The Problem of Beauty in Nature and Modern
Esthetics" and was supervised by the famed Karl Bühler,
director of the Institute of Psychology and a pioneer of
Sprachtheorie (theory of language).

In 1930 Bettelheim had married a schoolteacher who

was a disciple of Anna Freud, but he was unhappy. He saw
reflected in his wife's eyes the ugliness that had obsessed
him since he first saw it in his mother's eyes. In 1936 he
entered analysis with Richard Sterba, then secretary of the
Vienna Society and the only non-Jew on its Committee. At
the time of the Anschluss, Sterba abruptly abandoned all
his patients, preferring exile to the risk of being called upon
by the Nazis to rid the society of Jews.

When Bettelheim was arrested by the Gestapo on May

29, 1938, he was thus in the midst of his analysis. The ten
and a half months he spent in Dachau, and later in
Buchenwald, had a decisive influence on him. To escape
madness, he studied the effects of the camps on the other
prisoners, the prison guards, and himself. Whenever he
could, he shared his observations with Paul Federn's son
Ernst.

Bettelheim was liberated on April 14, 1939, and arrived

in the United States three weeks later. He had lost
everything. His wife left him. His first job was to devise a
test for evaluating knowledge in the plastic arts that is still
in use today. Between 1941 and 1944 he taught art history,
German literature, and psychology. Above all, he sought to
publish the article on the concentration camps that he had
been working on since his release.

Rejected several times on the grounds that it was

nonobjective or "anti-German," the article finally appeared
in October 1943 in the journal of the Harvard psychology
laboratory. "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme
Situations" is a study of the deportees that makes particular
use of Anna Freud's concept of "identification with the
aggressor." In 1945, General Eisenhower had the article
distributed to American officers in Europe, who were ill-
prepared for the opening of the concentration camps.

In 1960 Bettelheim returned to this text in The Informed

Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, the first book in which he
made a connection between his experiences in the camps
and the Freudian-inspired "milieu therapy" he established
at the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, of which
he became director in 1944. This connection can be
summarized as follows: Having witnessed mentally sound
people go insane because of the effects of the camps,
Bettelheim attempted to remedy the problems of severely
disturbed children by creating an environment that was
totally responsive to their needs and symptoms. This
approach remained Bettelheim's trademark and established
the reputation of his school worldwide.

In 1973 Bettelheim retired to California. He conducted

seminars, supervised therapists in training, wrote, and was
a sought-after lecturer. In 1984, the death of his second
wife, who was also from Vienna and had borne him three
children, plunged him into a deep depression that he
struggled against for another six years, pursuing his
activities despite health problems. After the publication of
Freud 's Vienna and Other Essays in January 1990, he
moved to a retirement home near Washington, D.C. Two
months later, he committed suicide by ingesting
barbiturates and, to ensure that he would not be "saved,"
putting a plastic bag over his head. Fifty-two years earlier,
on the same night, the Nazis had entered Austria to the
cheers of a crowd shouting "Death to the Jews."
 Bettelheim was a good storyteller and popularizer of
Freud's ideas, and his books sold very successfully. He
recounted his clinical experience in three books about the
Orthogenic School, Love Is Not Enough: A Treatment of
Emotionally Disturbed Children (1950), Truants from Life
(1955), and A Home for the Heart (1974), and in The Empty
Fortress (1967), which studies three cases of autism. With
regard to theory, he was a maverick. He initially conceived
of his school as "putting Freud's concepts into action." He
then distanced himself from Freud to flirt with culturalism in
Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male
(1954). After moving closer to the ego psychology that
predominated at the Chicago Institute headed by Franz
Alexander (The Informed Heart), he returned to Freud by
way of the self-psychology advocated by his friend Heinz
Kohut (The Empty Fortress), and he ended up writing a long
polemical essay denouncing the ways in which Freud had
been betrayed by his English translator, James Strachey
(Freud and Man's Soul, 1983). A careful reading of Surviving
and Other Essays (1979), a collection of Bettelheim's
writings on Nazism, gives a glimpse of the painful self-
analysis by which he continued, first in the camps and then
for the rest of his life, the work that had been interrupted by
the Anschluss.

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance

of Fairy Tales (1976), a study of the role of fairy tales on the
development of the unconscious, is Bettelheim's best-
selling book. He also wrote a book on education in the
kibbutzim, The Children of the Dream (1969), and many
other works on children's education (Dialogues with
Mothers, 1962; A Good Enough Parent, 1987; and numerous
articles).

Bettelheim's suicide was immediately followed by a

furious scandal, with former patients and students
denouncing him as a liar, a brute, and a despot who was all
the more hypocritical because he had preached respect for
children. Beyond what it reveals about the confusion
ensuing from the suicide of such a man, this scandal is
interesting because it goes to the heart of Bettelheim's
clinical genius: an almost infallible intuition about what
causes a child to suffer and the ability to confront his
patient's most destructive impulses. He often compared his
role to that of a lightning rod, attracting lightning and thus
proving that it had not killed anyone—not even him.

Too often catalogued as a specialist in autism,

Bettelheim was above all a master teacher who continually
succeeded in getting the therapists under his supervision
and the educators in his school to recognize the part of
themselves that was put at risk by their patients' madness.
That said, his depictions of the most disturbed students in
his school, including some autistic patients, were so vivid,
so focused on what these children were doing—and not on
their deficiencies, as was common practice—that his work
had a decisive influence on the way young psychotic
patients are treated in psychiatric hospitals around the
world.

NINA SUTTON

See also: Autism; Ego; Empty Fortress, The; Infantile

schizophrenia.
Bibliography

Bettelheim, Bruno. (1960). The informed heart:

Autonomy in a mass age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

——. (1990). Freud's Vienna and other essays. New

York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bettelheim, Bruno, and Karlin, Daniel. (1975). Un autre

regard sur la folie. Paris: Stock.

Jurgenson, Geneviève. (1973). La Folie des autres.

Paris: Robert Laffont.

Pollak, Richard. (1997). The creation of Dr. B.: A

biography of Bruno Bettelheim. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
 Raines, Theron. (2002). Rising to the light: A portrait of
Bruno Bettelheim. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sutton, Nina. (1995). Bruno Bettelheim: The other side

of madness (David Sharp, Trans.). London: Duckworth.