The Battle over Bettelheim
KRAMER, PETER D.
_Books ^Arts_ The Battle over Bettelheim The Psychoanalyst's Legacy Under Fire By Peter D. Kramer The creation of the myth of Bruno Bettelheim begins in the American Midwest during the Second...
...And in our consciousness, as members of the post-Freudian culture, the human potential for violence is ignored or marginalized...
...In the era of brief hospital stays, few psychiatric institutions can maintain a therapeutic milieu...
...In The Creation of Dr...
...In private correspondence, Bettelheim said that force—slapping around— has a role in child-rearing: "Of course I cannot afford to say that out loud, because it runs against all child psychology...
...Pollak's are harsher...
...Jung takes a patient as a mistress, Freud ignores patients' accounts of incest, Ferenczi cannot decide which patient to marry, the mother or the daughter...
...The more serious issue is the use Bettelheim made of this new self...
...B, Pollak charges that Bettel-heim was an inveterate liar, bully, plagiarist, and hypocrite...
...This view may not be wrong— certainly there are witnesses who saw Bettelheim in just this way...
...Bettel-heim had earned a non-honors degree in philosophy, he had made acquaintances in the psychoanalytic community, and his first wife had Peter D. Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac, is clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University...
...In this limited sense, Bettelheim was aware of and comfortable with his hypocrisy...
...To counterbalance these noxious influences, he placed children in a "therapeutic milieu"— a permissive setting built on empathic understanding of their behavior...
...These milieux were liable to abuse (in particular, long and unjustified stays for rebellious adolescents) but with the right leadership they could be powerful tools for redirecting the course of an illness...
...His next book, Should You Leave?, will be published in September...
...To sustain the milieu, Bettelheim worked tirelessly as an administrator, raising funds, building, conceptualizing...
...Bettelheim is a figure who ought to inspire wonder, at the juxtaposition of genius and fraudulence, wisdom and lack of control, public good and private shame...
...In 1938 and 1939, Bettelheim had spent over ten months interned at Dachau and Buchenwald...
...This method had grave problems...
...But there is a peculiar ahistorical quality to the presentation of the evidence...
...What are we to make of the grand old men of psychoanalysis...
...Residents describe episodes of slapping, punching, kicking, hair-pulling, and verbal attacks...
...At the same time, he concluded that regression was a normal response to overwhelming trauma that threatens the integrity of the self...
...in their experience, treatment of profoundly disturbed children sometimes required physical coercion...
...Nina Sutton is keenly aware of the loss...
...Bettelheim understood empathy much as psychotherapists do today—as vicarious introspection, a Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Viktor Frankl, and Erik Erikson—who created a line of psychotherapy that attends as much to social reality as to unconscious fantasy...
...As for Bettelheim's subsequent career as a "psychologist," he brought a comprehensive knowledge of the Freud canon, a talent for identifying salient issues in the profession and in individual lives, and a passionate dedication to the care of mentally ill children...
...But I know: boy does it feel good to be once in a while mistreated by a parent...
...Bettelheim considered madness a universal capability...
...With the therapist's loss of authority and grandeur, psychoanalysis has become safer, but it has also lost much of its power to perturb...
...Few actually met the definition of the newly minted syndrome...
...In the service of fund-raising— and self-promotion—Bettelheim misdiagnosed patients and then inflated his therapeutic success rates...
...The Bettelheim myth suffered after his suicide in 1990...
...The Ford Foundation was willing to underwrite innovative treatments for autistic children, so Bettelheim labeled his children autistic...
...Pollak attacks Bettelheim as a Svengali who created his therapeutic milieu by dominating impressionable young women counselors through "dynamic supervision"—in essence, requiring staff to take on the role of patient...
...She notes reforms at the Ortho-genic School: Physical violence and dynamic supervision are banned, autistic children are not admitted...
...He had done original work under the leading artists at the Vienna Kunst-gewerbeschule...
...Sutton interviewed others who were hit by Bettelheim but still consider the Orthogenic School a magical place...
...A recent immigrant from Nazi Europe, Bettel-heim applied for a position at Rock-ford College in Illinois, using an impressive, and in those years unver-ifiable, curriculum vitae...
...was an apt way of communicating to Americans, with their focus on cre-dentialing...
...Bettelheim contended that his survival had been due to his psychological skills, particularly his ability to continue to see his captors as individuals...
...The term once referred to a resonance with every aspect of a person, even what is most shameful and disturbing...
...and published two books in the field...
...Bettelheim reorganized the Ortho-genic School on lines influenced by psychoanalysis and his own profound experience as a prisoner in concentration camps...
...But even Pollak tells of interviewees who seem to have benefited from Bettelheim's combination of empathy and authoritarianism...
...Sutton's Bettelheim, which appeared in English last year, has a political-psychoanalytic agenda that may seem strange to American readers...
...In the end, while it is clear that Bettelheim was no saint, it is hard to have confidence that the figure Pollak depicts resembles the man under study...
...Pollak's account leaves no doubt that behind closed doors Bettelheim could be explosive...
...When he was good at teaching empathy, Bettel-heim was very good...
...Bettelheim proved to be as advertised: the most cosmopolitan faculty member Rockford College had ever seen and a charismatic teacher...
...in the brief psychotherapies available in modern health care, empathy has been reduced to nice-ness and general encouragement— cheerleading...
...Surely these will need to take into account Pollak's monumental research...
...A wild child who toppled furniture might return to his room to find the tables and chests bolted to the floor, a creative solution meant to prevent him from doing harm without punishing or restraining him...
...Given his remarkable competency, there is something at once pathetic and grandly funny in Bettelheim's forging (in both senses) an identity...
...In general, there remain few settings in which the expectation is that great effort and cleverness will be applied to the problems of disturbed children...
...Pollak succeeds in his main task...
...Empathy is so common a concept today that it is hard to appreciate the novelty of Bettelheim's approach...
...Bettelheim's contributions—his celebration of empathy and his insistence that the social environment matters—create a standard that makes inexcusable his violence toward patients...
...Bettelheim did hire a cohort of inexperienced women at the Orth-ogenic School...
...This argument may sound a bit over-the-top...
...Because along with Bettelheim's reputation, his contributions are in eclipse...
...Even empathy has been degraded...
...Here was someone who understood America, a credulous nation where a man can remake the self...
...It said he had studied for 14 years at the University of Vienna, earning summa cum laude doctorates in philosophy, art history, and psychology...
...A number of those women went on to positions of leadership in the helping professions...
...He became a man of parts...
...Nor were psychoanalytic outcomes behavioral...
...he proves that Bettelheim mistreated children and misled the public on numerous issues...
...Pollak denigrates Bettelheim's standing in the hierarchy of sufferers: These camps were not yet death factories, and Bettelheim was protected by bribes paid by his family...
...Often Bettelheim is judged according to the scientific or social standards of a subsequent era...
...Bettelheim looked past Freudian drives to the patient's actual experiences—again, this is the concentration camp history put to use...
...In such popular books as The Informed Heart, The Children of the Dream, and Love Is Not Enough, he weighed in on everything from the character of concentration camp victims to parenting styles on kibbutzim and in American families...
...All along, Bettelheim's colleagues had found his descriptions of the Orthogenic School hard to believe...
...But, finally, Pollak's book seems to me part of an unhelpful trend, self-congratulation masquerading as mature judgment, vendetta in the guise of biography...
...The accumulation creates a picture of a habitual liar who preys on others while aggrandizing himself...
...Instead, it tried to lull them to sleep...
...he would discover that freedom to enact psychic needs is more important than the enforcement of good manners...
...A proposed memoir about Stephen turned into a catalogue of Bettel-heim's acts of duplicity...
...It was Bettelheim and, more vigorously, the psychologist Carl Rogers who brought empathy to center stage...
...Former patients came forward to testify to his violence toward children under his care...
...Pollak does a service by demonstrating how dangerous hero-worship and psychoanalysis are in combination...
...He believed he needed to overstate the case against violence in order to make an impression on American parents...
...Before reading either book, my impression, based on stories that circulated in the profession, was that Bettelheim could lose control and hit children, but that he was not systematically cruel...
...But at mid-century, medical diagnosis coexisted with a psychoanalytic system that relied on broad categories—psychosis and neurosis...
...it is they who would spend long hours with difficult children...
...His success was grounded in a personality style common among successful administrators: energetic, arbitrary, demanding, and not a little socio-pathic...
...but such supervision, whose goal is to make caregivers aware of their own blind spots, was once standard in psychoanalytically oriented institutions...
...to land a two-day-a-week post in a small-college art department...
...Success was measured in terms of enhanced self-understanding, which was presumed to offer protection from further injury...
...A child who provoked by taking a bite out of one sandwich after another was not punished...
...helped raise a troubled child...
...Pollak's brother Stephen died in 1948 while on leave from the Orthogenic School...
...In Pollak's account, Bettel-heim, who lectured mothers on the harm that violence does, was the perfect hypocrite...
...The well-documented abusive behaviors are put on the table with other less easily verified charges, like the sexual molestation...
...it has become a pathological trait that appears in sick "abusers...
...The effort to understand those dichotomies might be part of a larger project, to make sense of the confusing legacy of psychoanalysis, a movement that has shaped much of our culture, from the way we raise children to the way we demand forth-rightness of one another, but whose history appears to be peopled almost exclusively by tainted giants...
...But even on the most pragmatic level, there are reasons to limit our self-satisfaction at the toppling of the icons...
...Pol-lak reports accusations by two women who claim that, when they were at the school in their teenage years, Bettelheim fondled their breasts as he apologized for inflicting beatings...
...For the most part, the helping professions have given up on remaking damaged personalities, except for those aspects of temperament that respond to medication...
...assisted at the Kunsthis-torisches Museum...
...But from 1926 to 1938—the bulk of the "14 years" at university—Bettelheim had worked as a lumber dealer in the family business...
...He hit children to control them in the midst of self-destructive acts, and he hit them when he himself was out of control...
...Drawing a parallel with his concentration-camp experiences, Bettelheim understood schizophrenia and autism to arise from extreme situations within the family...
...had run the art department of Lower Austria's library...
...But even Pollak concedes that Bettelheim's experience was "hellish...
...some former patients claim to have been crushed by Bettel-heim's tyranny...
...Books ^Arts_ The Battle over Bettelheim The Psychoanalyst's Legacy Under Fire By Peter D. Kramer The creation of the myth of Bruno Bettelheim begins in the American Midwest during the Second World War...
...the reader barely has time to consider one failing of Bettelheim's before another is piled on...
...That being said, Pollak demonstrates that Bettelheim gave an impression of the school's efficacy that no subsequent examination has supported...
...Pollak layers accusation and innuendo...
...There were snatches of truth in the tall tale, but not many...
...One does not have to be a devotee of analysis to wonder whether, as regards the darker aspects of human nature, our society and its caregivers are not in a selfrighteous state of denial...
...Sutton condemns the new conformity as "covert violence," presumably to children's authentic or potential selves...
...Still, Pollak is so unsympathetic to his subject—he is, for example, not at all amused by Bettelheim's outlandish CV—that he may inadvertently push readers back into admiration for Bettelheim, who was a survivor as well as a fraud...
...The real parents counted, as did the real rehabilitative setting...
...She asks: But in this new irreproachable institution, what had happened to psychoanalysis, to empathy, to the fantasies and phantoms that made living so unbearable for the children...
...Bettelheim's genuine contributions are never gathered together...
...But much the same ground was covered by the French journalist Nina Sutton, to quite different effect...
...Bettelheim's reputation as a psychologist began with the publication in 1943 of his observation of behavior in the camps, "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations...
...Though it has precursors, the therapeutic milieu was also innovative...
...In his 24 volumes of writing, Freud made only one substantive comment on empathy, and that comment is ambiguous...
...Sutton is painstaking in documenting instances when Bettelheim attacked children merely because he felt insulted...
...Bettelheim's case is ongoing—three additional biographies are rumored...
...Bettelheim would get a counselor to respond not to her own feelings but the child's, even when the child had smeared feces on the counselor's blouse...
...Bettelheim claimed this much and a good deal more (music studies under Arnold Schoenberg...
...Though dishonest, the fabricated c.v...
...To those awkward, not-so-presentable feelings...
...Now the journalist Richard Pollak has interviewed over 250 witnesses and read reams of documents in a painstaking effort to demolish every element of the legend...
...but it was the system that would have been most familiar to an art historian-philosopher after World War II...
...Bettelheim believed that a counselor could respond effectively to disturbed children only if she grasped their motivation through the methods of psychoanalysis and a new tool: empathy...
...he was, after all, a man who claimed to be able to empathize with his tormentors at Dachau and who required his staff to discover what was autistic within themselves...
...Once Bet-telheim had left, the Orthogenic School stopped seeking out and confronting hidden "killers...
...Bettelheim's standing arose from his renown as the wise and forbearing principal of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, a residential facility for disturbed children that he ran from 1944 until the early 1970s...
...By the time he aimed for the University of Chicago, the resume had been further improved with training in psychology, experience raising autistic children, and personal encouragement from Sig-mund Freud...
...She sees the violence as a tragic flaw in a man with heroic qualities...
...Dynamic supervision is very susway of knowing the other through examining the self...
...To Pollak, Bettelheim's violence completes the picture of the (ersatz) psychologist as monster, and this conclusion may seem the only one possible...
...Bettelheim arbitrarily labeled the death a suicide and blamed the boys' mother for Stephen's mental illness...
...The emphasis on the social "surround" puts Bettelheim in a tradition of American and American immigrant theorists—such as Harry Stack Sullivan, ceptible to abuse...
...To my taste, the exercise lacks any wistfulness, any sense of what is lost...
...Lumber dealer or no, Bettelheim was a true Viennese intellectual...
...Sut-ton's conclusions are along these lines...
...But Sut-ton, more than Pollak, seems intent on wrestling with Bettelheim's contradictions...
...had excavated Roman antiquities...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 29
