Bruno Bettelheim

Abstract

Bruno Bettelheim (b. 23 August 1903—d. 13 March 1990) was one of the foremost 20th-century thinkers about psychoanalysis, education, child therapy, and child development and treatment. He was born into a well-off Viennese family—his father, Anton, owned a lumber processing business, and his mother was the former Paula Seidler. (One grandmother had some twelve children, one of whom, he believed, was likely schizophrenic.) He attended gymnasium for a classical education and began his doctorate at the University of Vienna, where he studied until his father died. Bettelheim interrupted his studies to run the family business until 1937, then he completed his thesis on Kant and aesthetics. Some five decades later, he returned to this first love of aesthetics when he was invited to lecture in New York on art. He spoke on the artists who captured his heart and mind—Klimt, Kokoschka, and especially Schiele—artists who attempted to portray on the surface what dwelt within man’s soul. He contrasted them with the Impressionists, who focused on how surfaces shifted with changes of light. Reviewing Bettelheim’s contributions to our thinking means covering the many subjects about which he wrote and thought deeply, particularly after his concentration camp experiences. Like many Jewish refugee intellectuals from Europe—Fromm, Szasz, Erikson, Koestler, Adorno (and the unsuccessful refugee, Walter Benjamin)—his range of thinking was broad. Bettelheim’s writing covered the milieu and residential treatment of children, parenting, loss of autonomy in extreme settings, social prejudice, raising children in kibbutz, fairy tales, mistranslation (and misunderstandings) of Freud, and education. The essay “Freud’s Vienna,” as well as Freud and Man’s Soul, is the closest he came to a memoir. Prior to the Nazi Anschluss, Bettelheim joined the underground army in Austria as an officer. Once the Anschluss was announced, he was surprised, even shocked, that Austria’s neighbors did nothing and the army folded. He spent two months making sure his decommissioned soldiers were safe, and then escaped to the Czech border, where the Czechs promptly handed him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps beginning in May 1938.