Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy [Hardcover]

Nina Sutton (Author), David Sharp (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1996

A well-written, fascinating portrait of Bruno Bettelheim that seeks to uncover the entire man with all his flaws and all his virtues.

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.

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 lightning 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

From Publishers Weekly

"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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 606 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First edition (May 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465006353
• ISBN-13: 978-0465006359
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,986,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Another Attempt at Pseudopsychoanalysis, June 29, 2001

By 

Charles Pekow (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy (Paperback)

The reviewers who praised this book didn't check the facts and neither did the author. In fact, the book is highly inaccurate both in its facts and conclusions. The book merely applies the same pseudopsychoanalysis as the subject applied to his "patients," including me.

I was a source for the book and nearly everything in it about me is totally wrong. I shared considerable information with the author following a 1990 article in the Washington Post I wrote detailing Bettelheim's unsupported claims and physical and psychological abuse of his wards. The author promised that I could control anything that appeared in the book about me. But the book came out with all sorts of unsourced untruths about me that the author never bothered to check with me. From the looks of them, I suspect some she made up and some she heard from Bettelheim's defenders who worked at the school and broke their professional code of silence to reveal "information" about a "patient." It evidently never occured to the author that these people may have wanted to smear me to save their own reputations. The author even had the nerve to state as fact how I was feeling, which is amazing because she never asked me. In fact, I never felt the way she said I felt.

The book just amounted to the same type of Freudian nonsense I was subject to at Bettleheim's school -- someone else telling you that you don't feel what you feel -- you really feel what I tell you you feel. The book even managed to completely misrepresent what I wrote in the Washington Post. I have been quoted in many publiciations on this and other matters but I have never seen anything so far from the truth. The author didn't like my thesis and couldn't get me on the facts, so she apparently made up her own.

Immediately upon the book's publication, I notified the publisher by letter of the book's errors, but the publisher never corrected them in subsequent printings. And no one even had the decency to answer my letter. To this very day, the company continues to sell a book it knows is inaccurate.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars an ideal look at Bettelheim which is totally wrong, February 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy (Paperback)

As a former student at Dr. Bettelheim's school in Chicago, I found this book to be very inadaquate in its description of Dr. Bettelheim. This man did a great deal of harm to the students attending this school and was not the savior which Ms. Sutten would like him to be potrayed as. His methods of treatment can be compared with how the German Nazis treated their concentration camp victims. He did beat the students a great deal and fear was a common, shared, feeling which most of the kids felt towards him. His use of imtimadation towards the children, as well as the staff, was complete. Since Ms. Sutton was not a student at the Orthogenic School, of course she would not know the things that went on there. If Bettelheim was alive today, he would be arrested for child abuse, and this is a fact that Ms. Sutton doesn't want to admit.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Avoiding the issues, October 5, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (Hardcover)

A fascinating opportunity wasted. Sutton accepts Bettelheim'sown picture of himself entirely at face value, and the book quicklyturns into a lengthy exercise in avoiding the issues. She notes first-hand reports of brutality towards the children in his care only to follow them with psychoanalytic explanations of why it was really for the child's own good that Bettelheim hit them - indeed, Sutton manages at one point to give the impression that hitting a small child for crying was a positively saintly act of altruism on Bettelheim's part. Bettelheim's frauds - such concocting and entirely fictitious CV - are excused as creative exaggerations. Even his faking of his own results is explained away by the ludicrous line: "On a deeper level ... Bettelheim did not cheat". Any critics of Bettelheim's methods, are, it is snidely implied, acting out of their own deep emotional problems.

In fact Sutton manages to get through the entire volume, including inordinate praise of Bettelheim's cruel and absurd "The Empty Fortress" (referred to by Leo Kanner as "The Empty Book") without once mentioning that Bettelheim's notorious claim that autism was caused by parents' hatred of their child has been conclusively scientifically discredited. Nor does it seem to concern her that it caused years of suffering for parents told that their child's only hope was to be removed from them completely. Instead, she lauds Bettelheim's "understanding" of autistic children (although high-functioning individuals with autism are usually moved to hysterical laughter or fury by his interpretations) and even his psychoanalytic treatment of autism (although research shows it to be entirely ineffective). Anyone advocating an alternative view of autism is lambasted as cold, uncaring and only interested in neurology, and accused of wanting to train autistic children like animals, which is hardly an unbiased assessment. Given that Bettelheim's reputation was built around his "treatment" of autism, these omissions and distortions are culpable.