In this shocking, demythologizing biography, Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990), world-famous Vienna-born psychoanalyst, bestselling author and authority on troubled children, is portrayed as a dogmatic, arrogant, exploitative tyrant who manipulated and abused patients, a compulsive liar who fabricated stories about patients and embellished his own past. Pollak, the Nation's former executive editor and literary editor, charges that Bettelheim sadistically punished and emotionally abused children at the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, the residential treatment center he directed for three decades. The renowned healer tyrannized the staff, insulted and denigrated his students and was a stern, self-preoccupied, indifferent parent, according to Pollak, who bases his allegations on interviews with more than 200 people including former patients, colleagues and Bettelheim's son and daughter. Bettelheim, who grew up traumatized by his father's syphilis, spent more than 10 months in Dachau and Buchenwald, from which camps he was released in 1939. His own helplessness when the Nazis arrested him and his ordeal in the concentration camps was the basis, argues Pollak, for his proclamations that Jewish Holocaust victims cooperated in their own destruction because centuries of "ghetto thinking" had conditioned them to passivity. A professed atheist uncomfortable with his Jewishness, Bettelheim forbade children at the Orthogenic School to celebrate Jewish holidays and repeatedly urged Jews to assimilate. He enforced a racist, all-white admission policy at the school, Pollak maintains. Bettelheim's claimed rates of therapeutic success were greatly exaggerated, according to a systematic follow-up study cited here. Media celebrity made the prolific psychoanalyst a pundit, yet Pollak notes that Bettelheim's belief that autism is caused by bad parenting was demolished by thorough research as early as 1964, and he labels as specious Bettelheim's thesis that autistic and schizophrenic children behave much like helpless concentration camp inmates. Pollak's brother, who became a patient at the Orthogenic School at the age of six in 1943, died five years later in an accidental fall, which Bettelheim, in a 1969 meeting with the author, categorically insisted was a contrived accident, a suicide. That episode led Pollak to write this sure-to-be controversial biography, a significant, meticulously documented book that should force a reevaluation of Bettelheim's writings. Photos. (Jan.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Bettelheim's reputation as a pioneer in the humane treatment of emotionally disturbed children while director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School (1944-73) is challenged in this controversial biography. After Bettelheim's suicide in 1991, Pollak, journalist and former editor of the Nation, interviewed Bettelheim's relatives, colleagues, staff of the school, and former patients. Covering much of the same ground as Nina Sutton's earlier Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (LJ 7/96) but lacking her engaging style, Pollak reveals that Bettelheim lied about his credentials, fabricated his conclusions (including his success rate with patients), manipulated staff, and abused students at the Orthogenic School. In particular, Pollak describes Bettelheim's retirement years, his seminars while professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and the charges of plagiarism associated with his most famous book, The Uses of Enchantment (LJ 6/1/76). A final assessment of Bettelheim's work awaits release of Orthogenic School student files and follow-up studies of former patients. Recommended for psychology collections in academic and large public libraries.-Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
A thorough demolition of the reputation of Bruno Bettelheim, who is depicted here as tyrannical, arrogant, cruel, and above all a consummate liar.
Unlike Nina Sutton, who approached the subject of her recent sympathetic psychobiography (Bettelheim, p. 589) as a noble old gentlemen, Pollak initially regarded him as "the evil Doctor Sivana, arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel." A former executive editor of the Nation, Pollak first met Bettelheim in 1969 when he sought to learn more about his brother, who had attended the self-styled psychotherapist's Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center for disturbed children. The negative impression that Bettelheim made in this decidedly unfelicitous meeting was not greatly altered by Pollak's research. He examines several areas of Bettelheim's life especially closely. He questions the veracity of Bettelheim's published accounts of his concentration camp experience, upon which he built a reputation as an international authority not only on the camps but on the Holocaust itself. And after interviewing former residents and counselors at the Orthogenic School and examining Bettelheim's writings, Pollak concludes that his subject created a climate of fear there through his use of "Nazi-Socratic methods" and that his claims of success in treating disturbed children are largely unsubstantiated. Pollak is especially critical of his work on autism, which Bettelheim mistakenly attributed to bad mothering and for which he claimed remarkable but unproven treatment success. As for Bettelheim's well-known work on child- rearing on the Israeli kibbutz, Pollak characterizes it as "a sea of prose that, like most of the author's previous works, lacks any systematic source notes, producing a vague scholarship blurred further by the dense fog of anonymity that envelops the book." Further, Pollak asserts that Bettelheim plagiarized parts of The Uses of Enchantment, his 1976 study of the psychological meaning of fairy tales, and he backs up this claim with convincing quotes. While hard on Bettelheim, Pollak is equally hard on the lay press for what he sees as its gullibility in accepting Bettelheim's self-created image.
Strong, well-documented charges that are certain to stir rebuttals.
