Bettelheim: Living and Dying

"A self-declared 'critical admirer' and final confident of Bruno Bettelheim, David James Fisher succeeds with as balanced and nuanced a portrayal as seems possible of the character, the lifetime contributions, and the final justifications of a most controversial psychoanalytic eminence. Bettelheim was at once the center of major professional polemics, and at the same time, the psychoanalyst who, after Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, has had the greatest impact on the wider culture of the tw...