Bruno Bettelheim

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Bruno Bettelheim
Born August 28, 1903
Vienna, Austria
Died March 13, 1990
Silver Spring, Maryland,
United States, (aged 86)
Citizenship  United States
Nationality  Austria
Fields psychology
Known for former child psychologist

Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990), a Jewish native of Austria, became known as a child psychologist and writer after immigrating as a refugee to the United States in 1939. He gained an international reputation for his views on autism and for his success in treating emotionally disturbed children.

Bettelheim subscribed to and became a prominent proponent of the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism -- the theory that autistic behaviors stem from the emotional frigidity of the children's mothers—which enjoyed considerable influence into the 1960s and 1970s in the US. However, some indications suggest that he later changed his thinking.[1]. Bettelheim's 1967 book The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, which promoted the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, enjoyed wide success, especially in the popular press. The book played a key role in ensuring that the "refrigerator mother" theory soon became the accepted explanation for autism in popular culture and, to a considerable extent, in professional circles.[2]

As a result, many mothers of children on the autistic spectrum suffered from feelings of blame, guilt, and self-doubt from the 1950s throughout the 1970s and beyond: under the widespread assumption of the correctness of the prevailing medical belief that autism resulted from inadequate parenting.

Subsequently, medical research has provided greater understanding of biological bases of autism and other illnesses. Mainstream science has largely discredited Bettelheim's views on autism, although as of 2009 the "refrigerator mother" theory still retains some prominent supporters.[2][3]

Among numerous other works, Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment, published in 1976. In it he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. The book won the U.S. Critic's Choice Prize for criticism in 1976 and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought in 1977. Bettelheim discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales at one time considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.

After Bettelheim's suicide (1990) it emerged that he had falsified some of his academic credentials. At the same time, a number of his former patients came forward with accusations of neglect. Bettelheim's posthumous personal and professional reputation suffered considerably as a result.[2]

Contents

[edit] Background

When his father died, Bettelheim left his studies at the University of Vienna to care for his family's sawmill. Bettelheim and his first wife Gina took care of Patsy, an American child whom he later described as autistic. Patsy lived in the Bettelheim home in Vienna for seven years. Bettelheim returned to his education, earning a degree in philosophy and producing a dissertation on Immanuel Kant and on the history of art. Having discharged his obligations to his family's business, Bettelheim returned as a mature student in his 30s to the University of Vienna.[citation needed]

In the Austrian academic culture of Bettelheim's time, one could not study the history of art without mastering aspects of psychology.[citation needed] Candidates for the doctoral dissertation in the History of Art in 1938 at Vienna University had to fulfill prerequisites in the formal study of the role of Jungian archetypes in art, and in art as an expression of the Freudian subconscious.

Though Jewish by birth, Bettelheim grew up in a secular family. After the merging of Austria into Greater Germany (April 1938), the authorities sent him with other Austrian Jews to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months from 1938 to 1939. In Buchenwald he met and befriended the social psychologist Ernst Federn. As a result of an amnesty declared for Hitler's birthday, April 20, 1939, Bettelheim and hundreds of other prisoners regained their freedom. Bettelheim drew on the experience of the concentration camps for his later work.

[edit] Life and career in the US

Bettelheim arrived by ship as a refugee in New York in the fall of 1939 to join his wife Gina, who had already emigrated. They divorced because she had become involved with someone else during their separation. He soon moved to Chicago and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. He married again in the US.

The University of Chicago appointed Bettelheim as a professor of psychology and he taught there from 1944 until his retirement in 1973. He had trained in philosophy, but stated also that the Viennese psychoanalyst Richard Sterba had analyzed him.

Bettelheim also served as Director of the University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a home that treats emotionally disturbed children. He made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some of the emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology and became a major influence in the field, widely respected during his lifetime.

In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially evolved stories, children would go through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.

His writings covered a wide range of topics, beginning shortly after he arrived in the US with an essay on concentration camps and their dynamics. He long had a reputation as an authority on these topics.[4]

At the end of his life, Bettelheim suffered from depression and appeared to have had difficulties with it much of his life.[5] In 1990, widowed and in failing health, he committed suicide.

[edit] Controversies

[edit] Political controversy

Bruno Bettelheim became one of the most prominent defenders of Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem. He wrote a positive review for The New Republic[citation needed]. This review prompted a letter from the writer Harry Golden, who alleged that both Bettelheim and Arendt suffered from "an essentially Jewish phenomenon…self-hatred".[6][7]

[edit] Theoretical controversy

Initially Bettelheim believed that autism did not have an organic basis, but resulted when mothers withheld appropriate affection from their children and failed to make a good connection. The most extreme point of view suggested that mothers literally did not want their children to exist. Bettelheim also blamed absent or weak fathers. One of his most famous books, The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms. He derived his thinking from the qualitative investigation of clinical cases. He also related the world of autistic children to conditions in concentration camps. In A Good Enough Parent, published in 1987, he had come to the view that children were quite resilient and most parents could be "good enough" to help their children make a good start.[8]

[edit] Personal controversy

In addition to reassessment of Bettelheim's psychological theories, controversy has arisen related to his history and personality. He had a prominent reputation as a compassionate man who had made a career of healing others and as an expert on the dynamics of the concentration camps.

After Bettelheim's suicide in 1990, detractors[who?] claimed that Bettelheim had a dark side. They alleged that he exploded in screaming anger at students, and went beyond firm treatment to corporal punishment or abuse.[citation needed] Three former patients[who?] questioned his work and characterized him as a cruel tyrant. Other former patients wrote or spoke publicly to tell how much Bettelheim had helped them, so there seemed no consensus.[9]

Two biographies published in the US in 1997 revealed evidence that Bettelheim had lied about or exaggerated many parts of his background. These included wartime experiences, family life, academic credentials and the use of corporal punishment at the Orthogenic School. While Richard Pollak's biography expressed a strongly negative view of Bettelheim, that by Nina Sutton offered a different interpretation of some of the material. Gaps emerged between the public reputation Bettelheim had established in the US and some of the facts revealed during this controversy, but some commentators made charges that related to Bettelheim's personality.[10][11][12]

The resulting discussions and controversy called into question[citation needed] whether the University of Chicago had screened Bettelheim closely enough, although appointments to administrative positions such as director of the school do not require an academic appointment. Many parents who had children at the school claimed that his treatment had helped their children and continued to consider him a compassionate man.[citation needed]

[edit] Bettelheim on the impacts of bodily experience

According to Bettelheim, children - when treated with loving care - will internalize the care and love experienced in childhood respecting their bodies and their own person.[citation needed] The loving attitude of the parents towards the body of their child and its actions will transform into the child's holding its own body in high esteem, wishing to care and protect it.[citation needed]

[edit] Popular culture

In 1974, a four-part series featuring Bruno Bettelheim and directed by Daniel Carlin appeared on French TV - Portrait de Bruno Bettelheim.

Woody Allen included Bettelheim as himself in a cameo in the film Zelig (1983).

A BBC Horizon documentary about Bettelheim screened in 1986.[13]

Two former patients wrote about their experiences at the Orthogenics School, one in a novel and one in a memoir. Tom Lyons' novel The Pelican and After appeared in 1983. Stephen Eliot's brought out his memoir, Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenics School, in 2003.


[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Robert Gottlieb, "The Strange Case of Dr. B.", The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb 2003, accessed 15 Apr 2008
  2. ^ a b c Katherine DeMaria Severson, James Arnt Aune, and Denise Jodlowski. Bruno Bettelheim, Autism and Rhetoric of Scientific Authority. Autism and Representation, Mark Osteen (Editor); pp. 65–77. Routledge, 2007. ISBN 9780415956444
  3. ^ Feinstein, Adam. "'Refrigerator mother' tosh must go into cold storage". autismconnect. http://autismconnect.org/news.asp?section=00010001&itemtype=adam&page=9&id=4540. Retrieved on 2007-07-29. 
  4. ^ Robert Gottlieb, "The Strange Case of Dr. B.", The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb 2003, accessed 15 Apr 2008
  5. ^ Robert Gottlieb, "The Strange Case of Dr. B.", The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb 2003, accessed 15 Apr 2008
  6. ^ The New Republic, 20 July 1963
  7. ^ The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics by Michael Ezra London, 2007. Bookreview in DEMOCRATIYA
  8. ^ http://www.amazon.com/Good-Enough-Parent-Child-Rearing/review/product/0394757769/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
  9. ^ Molly Finn, "In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim", First Things, Vol. 74 (June/July 1997), accessed 15 Apr 2008
  10. ^ Boxer, Sarah (1997-01-26). "The Man He Always Wanted to Be". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/26/reviews/970126.boxer.html. Retrieved on 2009-06-01. "Bruno Bettelheim's new biographer lays his cards on the table right away: he thinks Bettelheim was a pathological liar."  -- requires free registration
  11. ^ Molly Finn, "In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim", First Things, Vol. 74 (June/July 1997), accessed 15 Apr 2008
  12. ^ Robert Gottlieb, "The Strange Case of Dr. B.", The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb 2003, accessed 15 Apr 2008
  13. ^ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-619953871843503232

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Major works by Bettelheim

  • 1943 "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417-452.
  • 1950 Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
  • 1954 Symbolic Wounds; Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
  • 1955 Truants From Life; The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
  • 1959 "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'", Scientific American, 200, March 1959: 117-126. (About a boy who believes himself to be a robot.)
  • 1960 The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
  • 1962 Dialogues with Mothers, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
  • 1967 The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, The Free Press, New York
  • 1969 The Children of the Dream, Macmillan, London & New York (About the raising of children in a kibbutz environment.)
  • 1974 A Home for the Heart, Knopf, New York. (About Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago for schizophrenic and autistic children.)
  • 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York
  • 1979 Surviving and Other Essays, Knopf, New York (Includes the essay "The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank".)
  • 1982 On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning (with Karen Zelan), Knopf, New York
  • 1982 Freud and Man's Soul, Knopf, 1983, ISBN 0394524810
  • 1987 A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, Knopf, New York
  • 1990 Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, Knopf, New York
  • 1994 Bettelheim, Bruno & Ekstein, Rudolf: Grenzgänge zwischen den Kulturen. Das letzte Gespräch zwischen Bruno Bettelheim und Rudolf Ekstein. In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1994): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz (Grünewald): 49–60.

[edit] Critical reviews of Bettelheim (works and person)

  • Angres, Ronald: "Who, Really, Was Bruno Bettelheim?", Commentary, 90, (4), October 1990: 26-30.
  • Bernstein, Richard: "Accusations of Abuse Haunt the Legacy of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim", New York Times, 4 November 1990: "The Week in Review" section.
  • Bersihand, Geneviève: Bettelheim, R. Jauze, Champigny-sur-Marne, 1977.
  • Dundes, Alan: "Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment and Abuses of Scholarship". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 104, N0. 411. (Winter, 1991): 74-83.
  • Ekstein, Rudolf (1994): Mein Freund Bruno (1903–1990). Wie ich mich an ihn erinnere. In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1994): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz (Grünewald), S. 87–94.
  • Eliot, Stephen: Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, St. Martin's Press, 2003.
  • Federn, Ernst (1994): Bruno Bettelheim und das Überleben im Konzentrationslager. In: Kaufhold, Roland (ed.) (1999): Ernst Federn: Versuche zur Psychologie des Terrors. Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag): 105–108.
  • Finn M (1997). "In the case of Bruno Bettelheim". First Things (74): 44–8. http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3709. 
  • Fisher, David James: Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen. Essays über Bruno Bettelheim (co-editor: Roland Kaufhold), Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag)
  • Fisher, David James: Bettelheim: Living and Dying. Amsterdam, New York, NY, 2008 (Rodopi)
  • Frattaroli, Elio: "Bruno Bettelheim's Unrecognized Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought", Psychoanalytic Review, 81:379-409, 1994.
  • Heisig, James W.: "Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tales", Children's Literature, 6, 1977: 93-115.
  • Kaufhold, Roland (ed.): Pioniere der psychoanalytischen Pädagogik: Bruno Bettelheim, Rudolf Ekstein, Ernst Federn und Siegfried Bernfeld, psychosozial Nr. 53 (1/1993)
  • Kaufhold, Roland (Ed.): Annäherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz, 1994 (Grünewald)
  • Kaufhold, Roland (1999): „Falsche Fabeln vom Guru?“ Der “Spiegel“ und sein Märchen vom bösen Juden Bruno Bettelheim, Behindertenpädagogik, 38. Jhg., Heft 2/1999, S. 160-187.
  • Kaufhold, Roland: Bettelheim, Ekstein, Federn: Impulse für die psychoanalytisch-pädagogische Bewegung. Gießen, 2001 (Psychosozial-Verlag).
  • Kaufhold, Roland/Löffelholz, Michael (Ed.) (2003): “So können sie nicht leben” - Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990). Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie 1-3/2003.
  • Marcus, Paul: Autonomy in the Extreme Situation. Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Mass Society, Praeger, Westport, Conn., 1999.
  • Pollak, Richard: The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.
  • Raines, Theron: Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim, Knopf, New York, 2002.
  • Sutton, Nina: Bruno Bettelheim: The Other Side of Madness, Duckworth Press, London, 1995. (Translated from the French by David Sharp in collaboration with the author. Subsequently published with the title Bruno Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy.)
  • Zipes, Jack: "On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim's Moralistic Magic Wand", in Zipes, Jack: Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1979.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim"
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