Customer Reviews

Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I found this book used in a bookstore, not knowing how riveting it would be. Bettleheim was indeed troubled for a number of reasons, but his insights and writings on childhood mental illness are astounding to me as a physician even now in 2009. Ms. Sutton has an amazing insight into the psyche for a layperson. She artfully portrays both the negative and the positve aspects of this incredibly talented man. Despite the onslaught of aspersions to his character after his death, Ms. Sutton conveys so well the contributions that he made, in spite of his faults. A wonderful read.

I consider this a truly excellent book, written and researched with great honesty - but as I am its translator, I cannot be considered a disinterested party, or even less an average reader!

For that reason, I prefer to simply quote from some of the very many favourable comments that the book has attracted:

"A well-written, magnificent, and fascinating book about a fascinating personality."
Elie Wiesel, Boston, March 1996

"Not long after she started to research her biography, Nina Sutton found herself wondering whose life it was she was writing (...)
Odd conditions, indeed, for a biographer to meet at the start of her work - but Sutton has dealt with them magnificently.
In her excellent book she has not only done the usual painstaking work, written it up with the grace that distinguishes the exciting from the boring biography, and well understood the psychoanalytic and the European background; she also has that extra touch of biographer's intuition that enables her to put all the differing views of the man into one whole."
Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books, New York, June 20, 1996

"Nina Sutton has accomplished a triumph of biographical fair-mindedness.
She not only closely scrutinizes Bettelheim's whole life, but at the same time she judiciously weighs all the tragic implications of the controversies over his work that broke out after his suicide in 1990."
Paul Roazen, author of "How Freud worked", March 1995

"This is the most unusual, exciting and disturbing biography I have read... Sutton's idealized image of Bettelheim was brutally shattered soon after she begun...
To her credit, she persisted in her research... Her result is a truly remarkable portrait of a very complex, brilliant, but haunted man."
Dr. Ruth Bennett, Reflections (London) Winter 1996

"Nina Sutton's biography of Bettelheim, the first to appear, is admirable in every respect: without concealing any of his weaknesses or the sometimes odious sides of his behaviour, she pieces together a portrait that carries the ring of truth."
Roland Jaccard, Le Monde (Paris) May 12, 1995

"Bettelheim was widely canonized while he lived and demonized after he died, but in this book Nina Sutton has taken the far more difficult course of seeking to capture the entire man, all his flaws and all his virtues.
(Her) "Bettelheim" is more than a remarkable biography; it is a model of the biographer's art."
Walter Kendrick, coeditor of "Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-25"

"A rigorous work, and a passionate one. While hiding none of the most unpleasant aspects of Bettlehim's character, it stays away from any scandalous intent, always bringing to light the complexity of a life that experienced success and glory, but also drama and suffering"
Fabio Gambaro, L'Espresso (Rome) June 2, 1995

"Nina Sutton has produced a well-researched psychobiography that makes engrossing reading.
She tells the sory of this protean life as if she were writing a detective story... Sutton searches for clues to her subject in psychological, psychoanalytic, cultural and historical terms. This quest adds depth and vibrancy to an already intriguing story... (She) writes admirably."
Claire Douglas,The Washington Post, July 28, 1996

"As an important intellectual biography of an influential man, this book is a fine accomplishment and fascinating to read."
Ann R. Epstein, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard, Nov. 7, 1996

"A biographer of Bettelheim faces a daunting task. It is pleasant to report that Nina Sutton's admirably judicious book makes sense of it all."
Frank McLynn, The New Statesman (London), Dec. 1995

"It is refreshing to come across a biographer who treats her subject with respect and compassion... This is a large book, written with deep concern for honesty and integrity, but also with a lightness of touch that makes it a pleasure to read."
Nigella Lawson,The Times (London) Dec. 7, 1995

"This excellent biography tells the story compellingly without falling victim to the image of Bettelheim as either witch or godmother; instead, it seeks to humanise the different myths that have grown up around the man....
As when one finishes any of Bettelheim's own books, one leaves this biography uplifted, hopeful, enriched... Like Bettelheim, Sutton allows weakness to be a part of greatness and her portrait, in its mix of affection and criticism, therefore has the ring of truth."
Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times (London) Nov. 18, 1995

"Certainly, Nina Sutton has left no pebble unturned. Her research has been exhaustive and she has followed every path which suggested itself, from pre-war intellectual Vienna and theories of Jewish self-hatred to the wilder shores of psychoanalytical in-fighting in Chicago and New York....
To understand everything is not necessarily to forgive, but, in this case, the author's determination to find the causes of Bettelheim's strengths and weaknesses, does manage to restore him, through a much fuller truth, to the disillusioned reader's sympathy."
Minette Marrin, The Sunday Telegraph (London) Nov. 26, 1995

"BB's story is a biographer's nightmare --but a biographer's gift as well. For the one thing that is definite about it is that it is fabulously dramatic: and so is Sutton's book."
Carole Angier, The Jewish Quarterly (London) Autumn 1996

This is a fine book which helps one to get an extensive picture of Bettelheim the man and where he came from....
It not only gives an account of Bettelheim but opens up thoughts about the dangers of working with disturbed persons... Like all true tragedies it is a cautionary tale for us all to note."
Eric Brenman, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (London) Fall 1996

"Bettelheim was a man of mind-boggling complexity, who has found the deep-delving biographer he deserves."
Roxy Szeftel, The Lancet (London) Jan 27, 1996

"Sutton usefully fills in the gaps in Bettelheim's account of his concentration-camp life.
His descriptions tend to the abstract, while Sutton reminds us of the very real terror, degradation and filth he and other prisoners experienced."
Lev Raphael, Detroit Free Press, July 3, 1996

"An uncomfortable and even alarming book, but one that seems to epitomize and to elucidate, in the story of a life, many of the traumas and enigmas both public and private at the heart of the twentieth century.
It makes you think for yourself and it makes sense - a rare combination."
Nicholas Mosley, Book of the Year 1995,The Daily Telegraph (London) Nov. 25, 1995.

This book - which was first published in France, in May 1995 - was awarded that year the France-USA prize (designed to reward works enhancing a better understanding between the two countries), notably for the way it portrays post-war America.

It also came 8th (1st in the non-fiction category) in the French magazine Lire's selection of the "20 best books of the year", in 1995.

Submitted by David Sharp (david.sharp@afp.com), Paris

The Uses of Enchantment (Penguin Psychology)

First, it is good to get all evidence and opinion out and above board. This should be true of everyone no matter if one is an ethnical or religious person Jew or Christian. Then, there is a matter of how this should be done? Where it should be done? When it should be done? Why? For instance, if persons or person passionate few agrieved against a group or political body they should attack prudently but immediately. Strike when the iron is hot as the old adage goes. No time to waste! Whistle blowing on companies are best done by individual(s) when their is enough information and evidence to find guilty in a court of law. And so should it be with doctors and hospitals, persons and people of positions of extra-ordinary trust and power over others. Not only for the patient-personal reasons but so the rest of us can be aware of malpratice and the knowledge that all that is white and professional fascade is NOT okay. Put on guard by those who are insiders. However, and this is how the case of trying to destroy the reputation and thereby Dr. Bettelheim was done, it was done long after the fact, after the doctor was dead(and as it handily happened for his detractors by his own hand) and in such a dramatic concerted media trial like ganging

Nina Sutton's prolix account of the life and works of the late, legendary psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim is a richly written, highly psychoanyltical portrait of one of the major figures in Freudian psychothjerapy. Sutton's investigative work into the early years of Bettelheim's life, played against the pastice of fin de siecle Vienna, offer the reader and student of the Freud-era psychofigures a rich and detailed portrayal. Moreover, the psychological underpinnings of the young Bettelheim's life in Vienna are detailed, with an orthodox Freudian tint. The fact that Bettelheim's father, a figure of enormous conflict and deep repression, contracted and slowly died of syphillis is a telling take; we are not sure of the impact that it truly had on his son, but Sutton's highly analytical guesswork is merely fodder for seeking to know the unknowable. The story of the relationship, a patchwork quilt of ambivalence between mother and son, remains a central part of the story. Sutton treats Bettelheim's rather mysteriouys period of incarceration at the hands of the Nazis with whisps of detail, as her research is basically unquantifiable: how to know the real why's and wherefore's of his early release , so early on? Others have made allegations that he won his freedom through complicity, giving rise to Bettelheim's later theory of 'Identification with the Aggressor'. Bruno Bettelheim emerges from Sutton's translated pages as a human example of what Churchill once said to describe Soviet Russia: an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle, wrapped inside of a mystery. The Orthogenic School, Bettelheim's place of career mark and the pinnacle of his life's work and fame, is treated to one of its first descriptions by one other than Bettelheim or a work by one of his associates. Sutton never visited the School, and never met Bettelheim, for that matter, either; her attempts to delve into the conflicts, plots, counterplots, strategies and torments of the man in his School, or lebensraum, fail to truly reach the mark; but, could anyone have done better, if they had not been a staff member at the School or a close Bettelheim associate? This work is important, highly readable, controversial, maddening, touching, with a power to illustrate that the power of life's events and forces, and how we interpret them, will largely determine how we bahve, and what we create. I commend this biography, flawed as it is by an overarching, sometimes treakly psychoballe, and recommended for those who seek to understand a public demigod in the field of human psychology. Jon Weinstein apex@webspan.net

I consider this a truly excellent book, written and researched with great honesty - but as I am its translator, I cannot be considered a disinterested party, or even less an average reader!
For that reason, I prefer to simply quote from some of the very many favourable comments that the book has attracted:

"A well-written, magnificent, and fascinating book about a fascinating personality."
Elie Wiesel, Boston, March 1996

"Not long after she started to research her biography, Nina Sutton found herself wondering whose life it was she was writing (...)
Odd conditions, indeed, for a biographer to meet at the start of her work - but Sutton has dealt with them magnificently.
In her excellent book she has not only done the usual painstaking work, written it up with the grace that distinguishes the exciting from the boring biography, and well understood the psychoanalytic and the European background; she also has that extra touch of biographer's intuition that enables her to put all the differing views of the man into one whole."
Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books, New York, June 20, 1996

"Nina Sutton has accomplished a triumph of biographical fair-mindedness. She not only closely scrutinizes Bettelheim's whole life, but at the same time she judiciously weighs all the tragic implications of the controversies over his work that broke out after his suicide in 1990."
Paul Roazen, author of "How Freud worked", March 1995

"This is the most unusual, exciting and disturbing biography I have read... Sutton's idealized image of Bettelheim was brutally shattered soon after she begun...
To her credit, she persisted in her research... Her result is a truly remarkable portrait of a very complex, brilliant, but haunted man."
Dr. Ruth Bennett, Reflections (London) Winter 1996

"Nina Sutton's biography of Bettelheim, the first to appear, is admirable in every respect: without concealing any of his weaknesses or the sometimes odious sides of his behaviour, she pieces together a portrait that carries the ring of truth."
Roland Jaccard, Le Monde (Paris) May 12, 1995

"Bettelheim was widely canonized while he lived and demonized after he died, but in this book Nina Sutton has taken the far more difficult course of seeking to capture the entire man, all his flaws and all his virtues.
(Her) "Bettelheim" is more than a remarkable biography; it is a model of the biographer's art."
Walter Kendrick, coeditor of "Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-25"

"A rigorous work, and a passionate one. While hiding none of the most unpleasant aspects of Bettlehim's character, it stays away from any scandalous intent, always bringing to light the complexity of a life that experienced success and glory, but also drama and suffering"
Fabio Gambaro, L'Espresso (Rome) June 2, 1995

"Nina Sutton has produced a well-researched psychobiography that makes engrossing reading.
She tells the sory of this protean life as if she were writing a detective story... Sutton searches for clues to her subject in psychological, psychoanalytic, cultural and historical terms. This quest adds depth and vibrancy to an already intriguing story... (She) writes admirably."
Claire Douglas,The Washington Post, July 28, 1996

"As an important intellectual biography of an influential man, this book is a fine accomplishment and fascinating to read."
Ann R. Epstein, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard, Nov. 7, 1996

"A biographer of Bettelheim faces a daunting task. It is pleasant to report that Nina Sutton's admirably judicious book makes sense of it all."
Frank McLynn, The New Statesman (London), Dec. 1995

"It is refreshing to come across a biographer who treats her subject with respect and compassion... This is a large book, written with deep concern for honesty and integrity, but also with a lightness of touch that makes it a pleasure to read."
Nigella Lawson,The Times (London) Dec. 7, 1995

"This excellent biography tells the story compellingly without falling victim to the image of Bettelheim as either witch or godmother; instead, it seeks to humanise the different myths that have grown up around the man....
As when one finishes any of Bettelheim's own books, one leaves this biography uplifted, hopeful, enriched... Like Bettelheim, Sutton allows weakness to be a part of greatness and her portrait, in its mix of affection and criticism, therefore has the ring of truth."
Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times (London) Nov. 18, 1995

"Certainly, Nina Sutton has left no pebble unturned. Her research has been exhaustive and she has followed every path which suggested itself, from pre-war intellectual Vienna and theories of Jewish self-hatred to the wilder shores of psychoanalytical in-fighting in Chicago and New York....
To understand everything is not necessarily to forgive, but, in this case, the author's determination to find the causes of Bettelheim's strengths and weaknesses, does manage to restore him, through a much fuller truth, to the disillusioned reader's sympathy."
Minette Marrin, The Sunday Telegraph (London) Nov. 26, 1995

"BB's story is a biographer's nightmare --but a biographer's gift as well. For the one thing that is definite about it is that it is fabulously dramatic: and so is Sutton's book."
Carole Angier, The Jewish Quarterly (London) Autumn 1996

This is a fine book which helps one to get an extensive picture of Bettelheim the man and where he came from....
It not only gives an account of Bettelheim but opens up thoughts about the dangers of working with disturbed persons... Like all true tragedies it is a cautionary tale for us all to note."
Eric Brenman, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (London) Fall 1996

"Bettelheim was a man of mind-boggling complexity, who has found the deep-delving biographer he deserves."
Roxy Szeftel, The Lancet (London) Jan 27, 1996

"Sutton usefully fills in the gaps in Bettelheim's account of his concentration-camp life.
His descriptions tend to the abstract, while Sutton reminds us of the very real terror, degradation and filth he and other prisoners experienced."
Lev Raphael, Detroit Free Press, July 3, 1996

"An uncomfortable and even alarming book, but one that seems to epitomize and to elucidate, in the story of a life, many of the traumas and enigmas both public and private at the heart of the twentieth century.
It makes you think for yourself and it makes sense - a rare combination."
Nicholas Mosley, Book of the Year 1995,The Daily Telegraph (London) Nov. 25, 1995.

This book - which was first published in France, in May 1995 - was awarded that year the France-USA prize (designed to reward works enhancing a better understanding between the two countries), notably for the way it portrays post-war America.

It also came 8th (1st in the non-fiction category) in the French magazine Lire's selection of the "20 best books of the year", in 1995.

Submitted by David Sharp (david.sharp@afp.com), Paris

Nina Sutton has accomplished a difficult task. She writes an insightful biography which is respectful to truth and to her numerous extensive sources.

Her ability to comprehend the complexity of his life and his motives and the unique therapeutic milieu which he created are amazing. Moreover, her account of his work, is a brilliant intellectual biography which is thoroughly integrated with knowledge of his personal life.

Sutton demonstrates a very complex and sophisticated understanding of the concepts of psychoanalysis, in her treatment of his writing and in her understanding of his purposes. She applies her deep and appropriate insights to his life. The book is illuminating even to those who knew him well.

Her treatment is deeply researched, and very balanced. While fully aware of his sometimes difficult personality, she at the same time maintains a larger vision of his achievements and purposes. Anyone would want their biography written by a biographer of such intellectual scope and insightful humanity.

I simply wish to say that there would no controversy if thoughtful, sensitive people were in control of their own emotions and were objective enough to put Bruno Bettelheim and his times in perspecitve. This is one of the implicit themes of the book.The author, a journalist, has study the facts and has the intuition to understand as much as any biographer can at this time a complex suffering personality. I hope only that the time will come when such a understanding can be objectively drawn. But meanwhile the biographer has made at least this attentive and by no means unskeptical reader understand the controversy and the facts of the case are not always one and the same...