The Fame Lunches Read online

  Ironically, it was during this period of genuine accomplishment that Bettelheim, perhaps in response to the anxiety of exile, “reinvented his past,” as Sutton says—or, as Pollak puts it, began to “dress up his vita”—to impress his colleagues. Among other dazzling Old World achievements, Bettelheim claimed summa cum laude in three disciplines, music studies with Arnold Schoenberg, extensive psychological training, firsthand experience with autistics, and an encounter with none other than Freud himself. He also began to circulate stories exaggerating his bravery in the concentration camps, and went as far as to suggest that Eleanor Roosevelt and Governor Herbert Lehman of New York had played a part in his release.

  For all these elaborations, however, when Bettelheim wrote a paper about the camps, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” his description of the experience was not only unadorned but, to some, disconcertingly clinical. This article, which was first published in a scholarly journal, was excerpted by Dwight Macdonald in an early issue of Politics, in 1944, and won the attention of an admiring intellectual coterie. It attempted to investigate the adaptation of Bettelheim’s fellow prisoners in psychoanalytic terms and proposed that the extreme nature of concentration camp life (this was before the existence of extermination camps per se) led to regressive, childlike behavior in a majority of them. The authoritative tone and the provocative, unsentimental stance of the article were characteristic of Bettelheim’s evolving public persona; the tension between this keen and disabused observer and the insecure refugee who felt compelled to glamorize his autobiography would mark him throughout his life. (Pollak, in a rare, grudging concession that his subject was given to an occasional honest impulse, notes that Bettelheim wrote Macdonald a letter correcting a mistake in his author’s bio: “I am not a psychiatrist, I am only a psychologist. I just feel that one should not make claim to a professional standing which one does not have.”)

  Bettelheim’s great claim to fame—and, more recently, to infamy—rests on the fact that in 1944 he became the director of the Orthogenic School, an institution for disturbed children under the auspices of the University of Chicago’s Department of Education. The children’s diagnoses included epilepsy and mental retardation as well as emotional problems, and its former director, a specialist in the electrical activity of the brain, was rumored to be a sadist. Bettelheim’s own impression of the place, according to Pollak, was that it was “dirty and stank of urine,” and his advice to Tyler, as he later told the story, was to burn it down.

  Over the next thirty years, Bettelheim was to transform the Orthogenic School from a neglectful holding pen into a much-admired residential center practicing “milieu therapy,” a form of treatment advocated by the Viennese psychoanalyst August Aichhorn, who specialized in the treatment of delinquent adolescents. In place of a stark, prison-like setting where the children were treated as small captives in need of bed-wetting supervision and neurological study, Bettelheim created a flexible dormitory environment. Counselors interacted with the children around the clock: shampooing their hair, reading them bedtime stories, and interpreting their every thought and deed. Bettelheim’s reforms were as revolutionary as they were ambitious, coming at a time when, as a former counselor at the school put it, “mad children were seen as bad children.” Milieu therapy aimed at curing rather than simply containing; the hope was that by creating a vigilantly responsive atmosphere, in which feelings from the past were observed as they emerged in the daily life of the school, children thought to be irredeemable would learn to stand on their own two feet.

  And, indeed, some of the school’s students must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven. The new director insisted on enhancing what Pollak refers to as a “sense of refuge,” with aesthetically pleasing, even luxurious surroundings. Thanks to his skills as a fund-raiser, the school featured ample food, fine china, and red crystal drinking glasses, as well as bedrooms whose decoration was chosen by the children themselves. Candy was freely dispensed from a supply kept next to Bettelheim’s office. Pollak reports, “Any child could raid this trove whenever she wished and was free to carry off as many Hershey bars, Chuckles, Baby Ruths, cookies, and assorted other confections as she liked, no questions asked.” The director’s own office door was mostly open, and he kept a pink pig-shaped cookie jar on his desk. Bettelheim also had an aversion to what he saw as a middle-class obsession with hygiene and bathroom habits, and instructed his staff accordingly: even regular bed wetters were not to be woken during the night, and he put an immediate stop to record keeping of the children’s bowel movements.

  But there was another side to Bettelheim—one that conflicted with his progressive anti-institutional instincts. He was often openly hostile to the parents of the children in his care, and strongly discouraged too much contact. This was at odds with Bettelheim’s public views on the maternal role, which were sufficiently middle-of-the-road and reassuring to make him a popular child-rearing instructor for young mothers. (His 1962 book, Dialogues with Mothers, was based on these discussions, and for ten years beginning in the mid-1960s he also wrote an advice column in the Ladies’ Home Journal.) Yet Pollak reports that as early as 1948 a confidential memo stated that Bettelheim was “incapable of appropriate parent orientation, or not interested in it,” and it is clear that he treated many parents of the children in his care dismissively. It was as though he needed to inflate his already considerable power by diminishing the influence of other adults.

  Then there was the question of discipline. Many of the children were difficult to control, and some were violent. Although the staff was not supposed to resort to corporal punishment, Bettelheim exempted himself from this prohibition, slapping the children when he saw fit. He was unwilling to comment in print on this aspect of the school; he feared, he said, being misunderstood by the average mother. But this reticence also served to ensure that the public’s fantasy of the school, which he had carefully shaped in books such as Love Is Not Enough and Truants from Life, remained untarnished by its more demanding realities. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Bettelheim saw everything through a psychoanalytic prism. He would become especially incensed over seemingly routine accidents—a dish being broken or a stray rubber ball hitting someone in the head—which he regarded as being filled with unconscious aggressive intent. (He also treated adolescence, with all its swagger and rebellion, as a failure of moral development.) And who was to question his interpretations? Within “Bruno’s Castle,” as a colleague mockingly referred to the school, his authority was troublingly absolute.

  As the years passed, along with effecting a magical transformation in the Orthogenic School, Bettelheim made an outsize name for himself as a maverick psychoanalyst and cultural critic. He was regularly tapped to pronounce upon controversial issues—racism, collective child rearing (in 1964 he visited Israel to do research on the kibbutz system), the Vietnam War—and he delighted in embroiling himself in intellectual debate. In his books, which were distinguished by catchy titles and a cogent, accessible style, he aired his views on subjects ranging from infantile autism to the true meaning of Freud. The Uses of Enchantment, his best-known work—an excerpt appeared in The New Yorker—explored the meaning of fairy tales. (Both Sutton and Pollak take up the charges of plagiarism recently brought against this book, which borrowed from an obscure psychiatric study published more than a decade earlier.)

  In 1973, Bettelheim retired from the Orthogenic School and moved, with his wife, to Portola Valley, in Northern California. There he taught seminars at nearby Stanford and continued to pit himself in lectures and in writing against the reigning pieties of the day. Beginning with the death of his wife in 1984, however, Bettelheim suffered a series of blows—including a variety of debilitating ailments and a rift with his older daughter, Ruth—which led to a deepening of his chronic depression. In February 1990, he reluctantly moved into a retirement residence in Silver Spring, Maryland. Then, on March 13—the same day on which, half a century
earlier, the Wehrmacht tanks had rolled into Vienna—the eighty-six-year-old Bettelheim committed suicide by downing some pills with liquor and then putting a plastic bag over his head, securing it at the throat with elastic bands. The news shocked and even angered many; the idea that this combative humanist had decided to take his own life seemed to undercut his feisty assertions about the need to overcome early damage and persevere in the face of the destructiveness loose in the universe.

  The creation of an “anti-myth”—of a narrative designed to subvert the ordained text, in which Bettelheim featured as an impish icon, a godlike healer bringing joy and chocolates to youngsters who had formerly known only misery—began within what seemed only minutes of his death. The man whose oft-stated conviction was that “our job is to help the patient to feel anger” seems to have done all too good a job: several of his former patients stepped forward with charges that Bettelheim had not only psychologically tyrannized but physically abused them. A former patient at the school published an article in Commentary which suggested that Bettelheim had recklessly misdiagnosed some of the children under his care and had systematically destroyed their self-confidence. (The author of the article, a graduate student in international affairs at George Washington University, had been labeled autistic when he was placed in the school at the age of seven.) Suddenly, there were rumors on top of stories on top of reports, all conspiring to make a mockery of the regard and affection in which Bettelheim had once been held. The picture that emerged was of a ruthless, power-mad careerist and impostor.

  Richard Pollak, a journalist and former literary editor of The Nation, is situated firmly in the enemy camp. Pollak’s brother fatally fractured his skull in a barn accident at the age of eleven while he was on vacation from the Orthogenic School, and he makes no secret of the fact that he is fueled by personal animus: he explains in a prologue that he went to see Bettelheim in 1969, twenty-odd years after his brother’s death, in an effort to better understand the circumstances surrounding it, and was horrified by the person he met. Bettelheim dismissed Pollak’s parents—the father as a “schlemiel” and the mother as a villain—and went on to assert that the death of Pollak’s brother had been a suicide. Pollak came away from the encounter thinking of Bettelheim in cartoonishly sinister terms, as “the evil Doctor Sivana, arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel.”

  This ominous image does not appear to be entirely a projection of the author’s, but there is no way a reader can avoid the impression that Pollak is committed to putting the worst possible face on Bettelheim at every juncture. He recounts every deception, minor as well as major, in an exhaustive welter of details. (How much does it matter, for example, that Bettelheim embellished his stories of life in the camps with fanciful tributes to his own stoicism? If he wasn’t quite the dashing hero he made himself out to be, he assuredly wasn’t vacationing in Bermuda.) The result is a carping and distorted account in which Pollak strikes an accusatory tone even when it is not called for, and races past poignant moments or warm recollections for fear of being deflected from his mission.

  Nina Sutton’s more judiciously balanced—and more convincing—account zooms in on the small, embattled figure of Bruno Bettelheim from the opposite angle: she began as an ardent admirer, uncovered many of the same discomfiting facts as Pollak, and ends with a tempered respect for a person beset by demons yet capable of rising above them to help others overcome traumatic experiences. Among those demons, according to Sutton, seems to have been an almost Nixonian sense of shame and self-hatred; this endured throughout Bettelheim’s life, in spite of his being “feted, respected and thanked,” and gradually engulfed him after Trude, with her “reassuring and constructive gaze,” died. (He wrote to a friend in Israel, “We had been loving each other for the last fifty years … I owe to her all I am.”) Sutton points out that the man who committed himself to, as he put it, “working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them” had a difficult childhood himself. He never got over witnessing his father’s tortured decline from syphilis and carried with him an unshakable conviction of his own homeliness. One of Bettelheim’s favorite anecdotes involved his mother’s alarmed reaction when she was first shown her newborn son: “Thank God it’s a boy!” He was also profoundly conflicted about his Jewishness, which resulted in some misguided views of anti-Semitism; he saw in his religion a mirror for both the repellent—“I’m nothing but an ugly old Jew,” he told his former editor as his depression deepened in his last months—and the admirable aspects of himself. This attitude, together with the feelings of guilt about his own successful escape from the camps, led him to condemn what he called compliant “ghetto thinking” and to take a censorious attitude toward the victims of Nazism that obscured his more nuanced insights into individual responses to aggression.

  A central clue to who the legendary Dr. B. really was rests, as Sutton implies, with the drastic paradigmatic use Bettelheim made of his survival in Dachau and Buchenwald. He spoke of that period in boldly contrarian terms, as having been in some way cathartic; he wrote that the “impact of the concentration camp … within a few weeks, did for me what years of a useful and quite successful analysis had not done.” Although the statement is, on the face of it, startling, if not outright distasteful, it makes sense in the light of Bettelheim’s remark to a French journalist that his year in the camps was the only time in his life when he did not have thoughts of suicide. The harsh conditions there—and, horrifying as they were, Dachau and Buchenwald were set up as concentration camps rather than death camps—allowed him to extrude his inner conflicts, to come down unambivalently on the side of life.

  His later application of the mechanism of survivorhood to the more subtle inflections of childhood damage set up a bizarre analogy. Just as the brutal intervention of the Nazis had shaken Bettelheim into psychological health, so he, in the form of the Big Bad Wolf (which is how he sometimes referred to himself), could direct the children’s aggression away from themselves and onto a more suitable object: namely, him. This method, albeit neither fully conscious nor fully integrated, amounted to an energetic realpolitik approach to the tenuous mental processes described by Freud. “Here,” Bettelheim told the counselors at the Orthogenic School, “the children are the id, you are the ego, and I’m the superego.”

  * * *

  The emotional heat that circles around Bettelheim’s memory suggests a continuing enthrallment, a primordial ambivalence of the kind a young child feels toward its parents. We are always looking for consistency in other people, especially in our psychological mentors, so it is hardly surprising that the earlier impulse to idealize Bettelheim has been displaced by an almost parricidal compulsion to break him down into his various—and often conflicting—parts. But if it is relatively easy to see how the man once thought of as “some sort of a secular saint,” as Sutton puts it, could be referred to in the pages of Pollak’s biography as “a fucking fraud” by one of his many detractors, it is more difficult to ascertain his genuine accomplishment in the blizzard of charges and incriminations that has covered him.

  This is especially true in the area of his leadership of the Orthogenic School, where the portrait of Bettelheim as evil guru has obscured the less sensational but more accurate one of Bettelheim as empathetic visionary. Through his work there, he succeeded in demystifying the shameful subject of mental illness for a naive and resistant public, both at home and abroad. His beguiling writings about the students, which were filled with pithy descriptions of esoteric psychological processes, helped to establish an attitude of interest in and respect for children who were once seen as not only different but defective. He humanized those “hopeless cases” he had inherited so they came to be understood through their suffering rather than scorned for their symptoms.

  It is important, too, to remember when considering Bettelheim’s approach to antisocial behavior that in the 1950s and ’60s corporal punishment was the order of the day, even for normal children. However questionabl
e some of his tactics may appear to us now, they were less extreme than the standard institutional practices then in use: psychotropic medication, isolation rooms, and straitjackets. The real tragedy is not that Bettelheim resorted to force on occasion but that he felt compelled to perpetuate an idyllic version of the school, much as he had prettied up his personal trajectory. If these deceptions served to protect him from potential censure in the short run, they made him all the more vulnerable to attack later on.

  As for autism, there is no doubt that he was mistaken, insisting on a psychological pathogenesis for the disease and also on a heady cure rate (85 percent) for the autistic children who were admitted to his school before the age of seven or eight. Even here, though, we would do well to recall that autism is still poorly understood and that the treatment for the condition in those days was more often than not to throw up one’s hands and leave the afflicted to stare at their shoelaces. While his grandiose conviction that autistic children could be successfully psychoanalyzed undoubtedly caused a lot of needless pain to their parents (who were led to believe that they had “caused” the disease), it also demonstrated Bettelheim’s passionate investment in the possibility of coaxing such children out of their frozen states. His dream was to “bridge the gap” between the crazy and the sane through comprehending the workings of the unconscious, no matter how dark and roiling they might be. It was a dream of inclusion, in which no child was to be abandoned.

  Bettelheim’s notorious antipathy to parents was, paradoxically, integrally connected to his advocacy for children. Despite his Dr. Spock–like interaction with mothers, he scoffed at the notion of a maternal instinct: “Of course there is none, otherwise there would not have been the many children who needed my professional services.” His belief that parents could, wittingly or not, do enormous harm led him to view the parent-child relationship as suspect until proved otherwise. “I cannot accept that psychoanalytic writings have created parental guilt,” he wrote. “Sure, they have added to it and given it substance. But guilt comes from way back when, way back deep down.” Viewed in this light, Bettelheim’s hostility has something paradoxically admirable about it: it is an undiplomatic manifesto meant to indicate whose side he was on, and he stuck to it well after the 1950s, when parent blaming was newly chic.