Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy

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.

A deeply sympathetic psychobiography of Bruno Bettelheim, the much honored yet controversial therapist who for nearly three decades directed the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a Freudian-based residential treatment center for disturbed children. When Sutton, Paris correspondent for National Public Radio and the London Daily News, began work on this biography in mid- 1990, Bettelheim had, she says, ``all the trappings of a saint.'' However, within weeks of his suicide that year, former patients began accusing him of brutality and sadism, creating a scandal that left even his close associates confused. To understand this complex man, Sutton begins by looking at his family--a syphilitic father, a mother who regarded him as ugly--and finds in his childhood the seeds of lifelong anger, shame, and self-contempt. In 1938 Bettelheim, a prosperous Viennese merchant becoming deeply involved in psychoanalysis, was arrested by the Nazis and spent ten months in concentration camps. At Buchenwald, says Sutton, Bettelheim, a chronic depressive, discovered the strength of his will to survive, a discovery that prompted him to devote his life to working with troubled children. His observations of human behavior at Buchenwald led to writings that established his reputation in the US, where he fled after his release in 1939. By the 1940s Bettelheim had become a new man, with a new profession, a new family, and even a new, self-invented past. Sutton concentrates on his years at the Orthogenic School, where ``his talent as a clinician sprang from his personality, his history, and his wounds.'' According to Sutton, his inner child took over at times, making him ``grandiose, demanding, provocative.'' That he exaggerated his success in treating autism and that he invented his professional background Sutton acknowledges. Whether he ever brutalized children in his care is less clear. A revealing study that nevertheless leaves Bettelheim as controversial as ever. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"When something bad happens to you," psychological innovator Bruno Bettelheim said, "turn it around and use it." He did. When the Nazis absorbed his Austrian homeland in 1938, Bettelheim was arrested for being a Jew and endured Buchenwald concentration camp for nearly a year. He arrived in the U.S. nearly penniless, armed with a doctorate in aesthetics. Never confessing he had no degree in psychology, he exploited his experience of psychoanalysis into an acclaimed and innovative career. Paris-based journalist Sutton, in what is almost a detective story, follows his rise to fame as he employed, in the words of one Bettelheim reviewer, "insights gained in the laboratory of the author's own life." His compulsion to master extreme situations impelled him to treat autistics (less effectively than he would claim) and to seek big grants that increased the pressure to claim research breakthroughs. However, psychiatric magic was often illusory, and bullying and condescension masked decades of anxieties compounded by survivor's guilt. Depressed and ill at 86, Bettelheim took his own life in 1990. Eulogies of the complex and stubborn Holocaust survivor as the "soul doctor" of mentally ill children were succeeded by indictments of him as arrogant and brutal. For this book, the first major biography of Bettelheim, Sutton, with sympathy, opens a closet of personal skeletons that will intrigue more than just professional psychologists.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After committing suicide in 1990, Bruno Bettelheim, the eminent child psychologist, had his reputation overhauled by a wave of posthumous accusations. His work with autistic children at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, once viewed as miraculously successful, was portrayed as sadistic and irrelevant. Psychologists today remain divided over Bettelheim's work. Journalist Nina Sutton has written a remarkable psychological biography of this elusive Freudian disciple. The work is sympathetic to Bettelheim but thoroughly researched and persuasively written. Cleverly, Sutton uses Bettelheim's own psychological theories to explain the influence of his unhappy childhood and adolescence on his personality. A good reporter, Sutton weighs evidence and separates the facts of Bettelheim's past from fictions he invented. Most remarkable about this biography is the volume of evidence Sutton has retrieved. Most records of European Jewry were destroyed during World War II, but Sutton has amassed Bettelheim family documents from prewar Vienna and letters written by Bettelheim in the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps and cites publications from throughout his career. The end result is not so much a vindication of Bettelheim as a more accurate portrait of the man for the reader to judge. Ted Leventhal

In his lifetime (1903-90), Bruno Bettelheim was regarded as an authority on childrearing and a pioneer of psychoanalysis. His prolific writings ranged from his experiences as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps to the Freudian interpretation of fairy tales. During his 29 years as director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, Bettelheim developed a unique form of milieu therapy, claiming a high rate of success with emotionally disturbed and autistic children. After his suicide, former students denounced him as brutal, and critics accused him of plagiarism, questioning his training and qualifications. In this first biography, certain to renew interest in Bettelheim's work, Sutton, a journalist and French correspondent for National Public Radio, assesses the life and work of this contradictory genius. In particular, she is able to explain Bettelheim's flaws in light of his early life in Vienna prior to his arrival in the United States. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.?Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.