Not Beetlejuice or Beezlebub (3 cents)

This is not about Beetlejuice or Beezlebut. It is about Bettelheim. Bruno Bettelheim.

When he died in 1990 at the age of 87, he was respected as an authority on troubled children, the impact of fairy tales on young minds, autism, and the Holocaust. Immediately on his death, he was accused of being a fraud and a bully, and his reputation was irreparably diminished. Biographer/psychoanalyst Nina Sutton wrote his biography, which was published in 1996. A quick trip to amazon.com shows the controversy surrounding her subject. The reviewers say that her book is masterful, that it made a saint out of a scoundrel, and that it made a scoundrel out of a saint.

Certain things are clear. Bettelheim, a Vienna native, spent a year in Dachau and Buchenwald (pre-final solution), until he was let out because of an exit visa permitting him to emigrate to the U.S. His concentration camp experiences had an extraordinary influence on his approach to youth and adolescence, as did his younger years growing up in a household with a prosperous, but syphillitic father, who died a young man.

Having been active in Freudian circles in Vienna (although his early adulthood was spent managing the family lumber business, and while he eventually received an advanced degree, it was not in psychology or medicine) and was not hesitant to portray himself as an analyst. Getting teaching jobs at Wheaton (IL) College and eventually the U. of Chicago, and being chosen to run the university's new Orthogenic School for children with autism and related conditions, he made a name for himself with his unusual methods of dealing with his students - primarily, giving them much freer rein than others, and avoiding treatment of their emotional condition with medicines or medical treatments. He apparently also, however, had a very difficult personality, and did not shy away from physical punishment, sometimes as a result of sudden eruptions. This was kept hidden from the public, however.

After thirty years at the school, he retired and moved to California where he taught some at Stanford and wrote. In his 60s, he became interested in the kibbutz movement in Israel, spent a considerable amount of time there, and wrote on the subject.

In his 70s, he wrote about fairy tales and their psychological impact, publishing his most widely read book, "The Uses of Enchantment" when he was 73.

In his 80s, after the death of his wife, and after significant conflict with his oldest daughter (the conflict being a source of great embarrassment to this expert on child rearing), he moved to Washington, to live near his youngest daughter. Shortly after moving here, in 1990, he took barbituates, put a plastic bag over his head, and died.

His story is interesting, filled with both great success and equally great failure. His theories about the origins of his charges' problems remain controversial, and he began to doubt himself in later years. As the school began to take more difficult cases, he found his success rate dropping, leading questions as to the accuracy of early diagnoses of autism. Although he pioneered in new treatments, the world moved beyong him to even newer treatments and better understandings of the mind.

His writings on the Holocaust were equally controversial, with some saying that, as a 1938-1939 concentration camp survivor, he could not write with authority. That only death camp survivors of the 1940s could really do that. But he clearly had a good understanding of how survivorship tactics worked at Dachau, and how different types of people reacted in different ways. This colored (I think positively) his later thinking.

He was against condemnation of the German people as a whole; he had psychological explanations for the behavior of many Germans during the war. He agreed with Hannah Arendt's treatment of Eichmann, as being a small and uniimportant man caught up in big things, the "banality of evil". He came in for a lot of criticism.

Expecting to fall in love with the kibbutz movement, he found it stultifying and doomed to failure. Again, more controversy ensued.

He started out as a liberal in America, but wound up supporting Nixon, and voting for Reagan. He was aghast at the student riots of the late 1960s, which he declared "bad for the Jews". This did not endear him to many who would be expected to be his biggest admirers.

A complicated life; a complicated, but very interesting and satisfying, book.