Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy

Sutton, Nina; Sharp, David (translator)

ISBN 10: 0465006353 / ISBN 13: 9780465006359

Published by HarperCollins, New York, 1996

About this Item

Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Seller Inventory # G14749

Bibliographic Details

Title: Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy

Publisher: HarperCollins, New York

Publication Date: 1996

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: First Thus.

Book Type: Remainder

About this title

Synopsis:

Who was Bruno Bettelheim? The brilliant discoverer of a unique method of treating psychotic children, justly acclaimed the world over? Or the brutal and despotic bully who was denounced after his death by former students and patients?
In her quest to understand this puzzling and powerful man, Nina Sutton spent five years tracing Bettelheim's footsteps from Vienna to Los Angeles, via Chicago, Basel, and Jerusalem. She interviewed students and colleagues, friends and enemies, and uncovered rare documents, including Bettelheim's letters from Buchenwald and Dachau.
As the internationally famous director of the Orthogenic School in Chicago and the author of a dozen bestsellers on Nazism, child rearing, emotional disturbances, and fairy tales, Bettelheim was always surrounded by controversy. He was a Jew who rejected the inevitability of the Holocaust, a psychoanalyst who challenged the very notion of "insanity," and a man who liked to shroud his life in mystery and sometimes outright lies.
Most significantly, he was a therapist driven by an almost magical idea: that from an absolute evil, Nazism, could be drawn the salvation of deeply disturbed children. Sutton shows how Bettelheim discovered his life force in the concentration camp and then tried to use his own aggression as a lighting rod for the self-destructive anger and violence seething within the children in his care. Probing deep into his past and into the scandal that broke out after his suicide, she reveals how care and brutality, commitment to truth and a passion for fairy tales, could coexist in this exceptional man.

Review:

Bruno Bettelheim was a legendary psychotherapist; a revered author of influential clinical studies on the lives of autistic children as well as popular Freudian interpretations of myth and fairy tale; and founder of the Orthogenic School of psychoanalysis in Chicago. Nina Sutton, an admirer of his work, found herself stunned by the "Bettelheim Affair"--the scandal that erupted after he killed himself in 1990, at the age of 86, when his reputation as a benevolent sage was besmirched by former patients who claimed that he had sadistically beaten them. Beginning her biography with an account of that scandal, Sutton proceeds to analyze the legacy of the man's work, relating it to his difficult life, and goes some way toward reclaiming Bettelheim's damaged reputation.