Bettelheim Undeconstructed

Review of David James Fisher, Bettelheim: Living and Dying. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. ISBN: 978-90-420-2380-2, i-x, 180 pages, paperback $57.00.

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A variegated contingent of local “antisocials” sent from Vienna to SS labor camps in Germany some weeks after the Anschluss of March 1938 included a Jewish businessman, occasional graduate student at the University of Vienna, and self-taught Freudian in his middle thirties named Bruno Bettelheim. After ten-and-a-half months in Dachau and then Buchenwald, Bettelheim obtained his release and promptly emigrated to the United States, where an article by him in 1943 on the fragmenting, infantilizing, and brutalizing effect of internment under the SS won him huge prestige overnight. A faculty appointment to the University of Chicago as director of the Orthogenic School for disturbed, and especially autistic, children ensued in 1944. His professed aim for the school was to afford helpless, emotionally injured children a permissive, supportive environment away from what he took to have been their pathogenic situations at home. In numerous challenging books and articles thereafter he most famously ascribed the Jews’ failure to resist the Holocaust to their ghetto mentality, blamed autism on uncaring parents (primarily on cold mothers), interpreted fairy tales on Freudian lines as aids to children coming to terms with the world, and faulted the standard English version of Freud’s writings and the Anglo-American psychoanalytic establishment for technicalizing and schematizing psychoanalysis, which he saw as properly “an art and not a science” (p. 142). In March 1990, widowed and in painfully failing health, Bettelheim committed suicide.

By the time Bettelheim retired from Chicago in 1973, the biological basis of autism had already been established as against his view of its source in hostile parenting. Then after his suicide his other claims to fame were challenged one by one with a vengeance including notably the autistic ward or wards he had professedly cared for at home in Vienna and the autistic patients he had professedly cured in Chicago, his supposed advanced university degrees in three fields, his alleged full training analysis in Vienna, his putative acquaintance with Freud, his pretended underground anti-Nazi resistance behind his arrest in 1938, his would-be defiance of his SS prison guards at Dachau and Buchenwald, and his declared conduct of 1500 interviews with fellow prisoners. He was said to have pirated others’ research with the help of ghostwriters, most notably for his prize-winning book on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment (1963). His proud prescription of compassionate care for the highly disturbed children in his school was overwritten by attestations of his abusive maltreatment of children not all that disturbed to begin with. His protests against the wrongful schematization of Freud in English fell by the way: no one tried harder to schematize Freud than Freud himself right down to his last, unfinished work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. My own favorite specimen of Bettelheim’s failed retranslations of Freud is: “Where it was, there should become I” (p. 25). Worst of all, Bettelheim’s self-styling as a “Holocaust survivor” came to look increasingly unscrupulous in the light of his other false pretenses. He was not interned in 1938-1939 as a Jew slated for extermination; on the contrary, throughout the Reich the pressure was then on for Jews to emigrate, with the Final Solution still years ahead.

For his remaining defenders, the trouble with these charges that dead Bettelheim freely invented himself is that they hold up all too well. Perhaps the most articulate and persuasive of those die-hard admirers of Bettelheim is David James Fisher. Ever since the first posthumous assaults on Bettelheim, Fisher has come faithfully to his defense. The present volume is composed of Fisher’s major short writings vindicating Bettelheim’s life’s work and documenting his own cordial traffic with Bettelheim toward the last, including extracts from two relaxed interviews of Bettelheim. In Fischer’s view, Bettelheim amplified Freud’s late-life humanistic outlook with a premium on differentness, a contempt for all orthodoxies, systems, cults, and jargons, and an engaging Old World, even Austro-Marxist, accent. Fisher’s Bettelheim was a challenging guru in person, one often hated in his love to provoke, to debunk, to debate.

Fisher vouches persuasively for “Bettelheim’s underlying sensitivity and empathy that was often disguised beneath his forceful rhetoric and aggressive tone” (p. 77). He nicely validates several of Bettelheim’s new departures in psychoanalysis, such as interpreting children’s play on a par with their dreams. He does not so much deny the allegations of fraud leveled against Bettelheim as downplay them by styling him as a mercurial sage full of contradictions and by writing off his

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posthumous detractors for attacking him only when he could no longer answer. Yet he does implicitly, and incongruously, exonerate Bettelheim in calling him “a proponent of the reality principle” (p. 60) and insisting that “if there was one common denominator” to Bettelheim’s “life of contradiction and creativity … it was his unrelenting honesty” (p. 161). Above all, he falls in with Bettelheim’s most egregious false pretense by writing repeatedly of Bettelheim’s “experience of the Holocaust” (pp. 54, 162, and passim). The big casualty of Fisher’s failure to call Bettelheim’s bluffs is his otherwise ever so judicious judgment of Bettelheim’s character and contribution.

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