Rising to the Light: A Potrait of Bruno Bettelheim (Fine First Edition)

In 1983, after years of trying to persuade Bruno Bettelheim to write his autobiography, Theron Raines, his friend and literary agent, himself undertook to tell the life of the renowned but often controversial child psychologist. With no thought of writing a conventional biography, Raines began a series of interviews in which Bettelheim reflected at length upon the major moments—triumphs, crises, and tragedies—of his extraordinary life. Rising to the Light is the fascinating synthesis of these encounters and of Raines’s interviews with counselors, teachers, and former students from the world-famous Orthogenic School.

Here is Bettelheim’s sudden passage from a life of wealth and luxury in Vienna to the appalling brutality of Dachau and Buchenwald, where his intellect helped him survive the horrific conditions that often broke down a prisoner’s personality. His understanding of the parallels between the extreme situation of a concentration-camp prisoner and the inner world of a disturbed child would shape him as a therapist. Here is his voyage from the Old World to the New, and his professional ascent in Chicago, where he developed a total therapeutic milieu for children unable to survive emotionally at home or in any other school. Though he had no specialized training, he was uniquely qualified by his uncanny insights into children and his deep Freudian and post-Freudian convictions about human nature and behavior. Based on his success as a clinician and teacher, he would go on to become a best-selling author. But toward the end of a long life, Bettelheim would succumb to a stroke and to a devastating depression intensified by his feelings of uselessness when he was no longer able to do the work that had been his daily salvation for so many decades. Raines, who visited him twice in his last weeks, also gives us the days just before the puzzling suicide of this man who had endured and built so much.

Despite his demonstrably tireless commitment to children, Bettelheim’s reputation was blemished after his death by attacks on his writings and his unorthodox clinical methods, in particular his use of physical discipline in the psychotherapeutic setting. Raines’s conversations with Bettelheim have much to tell us about this bitterly disputed aspect of his legacy, and they reveal a complex man who had to explore the boundary between compassion and brutality.

Rising to the Light is a portrait of a great teacher; it gives us a more direct line of sight into the Bettelheim enigma than any other book is likely to provide.

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Theron Raines served in the air force as a navigator; later, he earned degrees from Columbia College, Columbia University, and Oxford University. He has been a literary agent for many years, and his distinguished client list has included, apart from Bruno Bettelheim, James Dickey, Winston Groom, Raul Hilberg, Willie Morris, and Cynthia Ozick.