SOURCE: Roazen, Paul. “The Rise and Fall of Bruno Bettelheim.” Psychohistory Review: Studies of Motivation in History and Culture 20, no. 3 (spring 1992): 221-50.

[In the following essay, Roazen investigates the reasons for the decline of Bettelheim's reputation.]

Bruno Bettelheim's role in the history of psychoanalysis has long been known to be a special one, but now it appears that his place is bound to remain every bit as contentious as that of any other figure in the controversial story of the development of Freud's school. Perhaps the height of Bettelheim's stature, at which time he was probably the most famous psychoanalyst in the world, came when Woody Allen cast him for the part of an interpreting psychiatrist in Zelig (1983). Ever since his suicide in 1990, however, Bettelheim's standing has been in a slump, and subsequent accusations against him by former patients have meant that the downturn of his reputation has deepened drastically.

Out of all his impressive body of writings, he will probably remain best known for his famous study on Nazi concentration camps. In 1943, while Bettelheim was associated with a little-known institution called Rockford College in Illinois, he published in a relatively obscure journal, after being turned down elsewhere, an article titled “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations.” Here he had a chance, at a time when the general public was still unaware of some of the worst atrocities of the Nazis, to report on his own observations after having spent “approximately a year” (1943, 417) at Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938-39. Dwight MacDonald republished parts of Bettelheim's piece soon afterwards, and it has subsequently become a classic document in modern social science.

They were then camps, Bettelheim reported, “for political prisoners, (418) and he detailed the ways in which he thought the inmates reacted oddly, by the standards of pure rationality, to their confinement. Bettelheim said he himself had survived the ordeal by having made the decision, as a psychologist, to protect the integrity of his personality through observing and collecting data about how the camps affected the personalities of other prisoners. He distanced himself from what he experienced and differentiated his own response from that of others by the self-protective device of using his knowledge of depth psychology to interpret behavior under the extremity of what only later came to be known as the Holocaust.

Although he reported that at the time “extreme malnutrition” had “deteriorated” his memory, Bettelheim recounted how he found two compatriots, one the son of a Viennese psychoanalyst, to share their thoughts and feelings with him. (The analyst's son has since reported that Bettelheim spent seven to eight months in the camps.) Bettelheim proposed that the “initial shock” of incarceration had been hardest for the nonpolitical middle-class prisoners, who were “a small minority,” to resist: “They had no consistent philosophy which would protect their integrity as human beings, which would give them the force to make a stand against the Nazis.” From this population came “the several suicides” and these people were the ones responsible also for antisocial behavior like cheating on fellow inmates and spying in behalf of the Gestapo (422, 424-7).

Bettelheim contrasted the behavior of others with his own fundamental choice. Perhaps the most enduring sentence in all Bettelheim's work, for me, was how he summed up in italics “his main problem” during the time he spent in the camps: “to safeguard his ego in such a way, that, if by any good luck he should regain liberty, he would be approximately the same person he was when deprived of liberty” (431).

Prisoners adapted to the camp situation in different ways. Bettelheim studied their dreams and fantasies; readers at the time must have been startled to learn how impossible “open resistance” was, “as impossible as it was to do anything definite to safeguard oneself.” In passing, he commented that the “few who had tried to fight back could not be interviewed; they were dead.” While everyday experiences that might have occurred in “normal” life provoked a “normal” reaction, he argued that paradoxically the greater the suffering in the camps the more apt people were to accept their lot as martyrs and not to resent it (434, 430, 435).

Those who stayed in the camps more than a year became, in Bettelheim's terms, “old prisoners,” and were, he held, apt to change their attitudes towards families and friends in a way that he thought qualified them for being described as having “transgressed to infantile behavior.” Such people, he alleged, exhibited a wide variety of irrational responses. For example, they wanted to believe that in the outside world, which they had been forced to leave, “their worldly possessions should be secure and untouched, although they were of no use to them at this moment” (439, 440). To think of change back home was too threatening.

More troubling, and here some have thought that Bettelheim was insulting his fellow sufferers, was his proposal that such old prisoners tended to adopt the convictions of their persecutors. “They had learned to direct a great amount of aggression against themselves so as not to get into too many conflicts with the Gestapo, while the new prisoners still directed their aggressions against the outer world, and—when not supervised—against the Gestapo” (443). (This was another sentence that Bettelheim italicized.)

While Bettelheim and “the few other prisoners who realized what was happening” held back and retained their autonomy, he complained about a mass behavioral pattern that he considered an example of regression into infantilism: “ambivalence to one's family, despondency, finding satisfaction in daydreaming rather than in action.” By allowing themselves to be pushed by circumstances into “childhood attitudes and behaviors,” they “became in this way more or less willing tools of the Gestapo (444, 447).

It is hard for me to evaluate how Bettelheim's argument was then received. He was, of course, describing the perfectly dreadful, almost unimaginable circumstances of concentration camp life. But he was not talking about factories of extermination, since that part of Hitler's program had yet to be inaugurated during the period in the late 1930s when Bettelheim himself was imprisoned. The public has too easily been muddled over the extent of Bettelheim's personal experiences. William Styron in Sophie's Choice somehow relied on Bettelheim's authority about Auschwitz, while in fact Bettelheim had nothing to do with any of the death camps; he was already in the United States by 1939.

It is still memorable and shocking how Bettelheim in his 1943 article thought that a prisoner had reached “the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo” (447). In 1936 Anna Freud, in a book written while her father was alive and in the spirit of the work of his disciple Sandor Ferenczi, described the “defense” of identifying with the aggressor (1937, Ch. 9), and Bettelheim was giving concrete illustrations of this unconscious self-defeating process. For example, he said “It was not unusual to find old prisoners, when in charge of others, behaving worse than the Gestapo. …” He maintained that not only did “old prisoners” seem “to have a tendency to identify themselves with the Gestapo” in regard to aggressive behavior, but “they would try to arrogate to themselves old pieces of Gestapo uniforms.” While rationally the old prisoners should have resisted their tormentors, Bettelheim was saying that instead they “accepted their goals and values, too, even when they seemed opposed to their own interests” (1943, 448). Bettelheim was appalled at what he observed, though it confirmed some of the worst of what psychoanalysis had taught about the human condition.

At the end of his paper, just before summarizing its findings, Bettelheim placed a paragraph that struck me, when I reread the essay long after first coming across it, as weird. For he seemed here to be trying somehow to retract, under pressure from his editors or out of conformity to contemporary sensibilities, the essential theoretical message of his piece, covering the tracks of his iconoclasm with words that might protect him from critics:

After so much has been said about the old prisoners' tendency to conform and to identify with the Gestapo, it ought to be stressed that this was only part of the picture, because the author tried to concentrate on interesting psychological mechanisms in group behavior rather than in reporting types of behavior which are either well known or could reasonably be expected, These same old prisoners who identified with the Gestapo at other moments defied it, demonstrating extraordinary courage in doing so.

(1943, 451)

In essence, however he may have tried to pull back at the last moment, the crux of Bettelheim's argument led in a different direction. When he went on to call “greater Germany” a “big concentration camp” (452), he meant to denounce how people collectively had failed to resist outside conformist pressures. Bettelheim was trying to uphold the ideal of the individual as an autonomous and self-reliant entity, as opposed to what he perceived as the degradation of the human spirit under the extremity of the Nazi system.

However critically others might have reacted to Bettelheim's article later on, at the time it did seem to register an important anti-fascist message. Bettelheim's publisher for many years, The Free Press of Glencoe, reported on a later book jacket that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had made “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” required reading “for all military government officers in Europe.” It is known that when, at the end of the war, Eisenhower first saw the liberated camps, he was literally sickened, and insisted on the local townspeople being marched through them to see the horror for themselves. I do not know how he heard about Bettelheim's piece; a staff officer may have brought it to his attention. Alternatively, the impetus may have come from higher up; one story has it that Eleanor Roosevelt was involved in getting Bettelheim out of Buchenwald in 1939, and perhaps she took notice of his work. She stayed once with General Lucius Clay, head of the American military government in Germany, and it is known that he thought the world of her.

Growing up in the 1950s, as I did, meant that Bettelheim had not, in my own education, attained the general stature he had acquired by the 1980s; his writings were never included as part of my own required reading. As a Jew I was reasonably aware of the significance of what had happened in the concentration camps; on a trip through Europe as a teenager I had paid a silent pilgrimage through a barren detention camp in the Netherlands used by the Germans during both world wars. And during my first year at Harvard College, in the spring of 1955, one of my best teachers showed us movies taken of the camps by liberating allied soldiers; these amateur-seeming black-and-white shots were all the more impressive for their immediacy and lack of professionalism, and as a college instructor myself I have always shown first-year students some comparable film footage. But psychoanalysis, or at least Bettelheim's use of it, was by no means central to my undergraduate reading. We were, to be sure, assigned Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents in another freshman course and, in my second year, I read Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom. (The rise and fall of the reputation of Fromm, another nonmedical analyst like Bettelheim, would be altogether another tale. In the 1950s Fromm was critically important to our undergraduate life. I later read every book he ever published, and I was subsequently impressed by his special insightfulness when I was lucky enough to have some personal contact with him; but from the so-called radical 1960s on his standing among the intelligentsia began to slump. Although some of his books continue to sell widely, he has never recaptured among intellectuals the ground he lost since the 1950s.)

During my first year of graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago during 1958-59, I heard a good deal about Bettelheim. He was then teaching on the Committee of Human Development there, and also since 1944 had been head of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for “autistic” children. As it was first explained to me, according to the strict categories of classical psychiatry, children could not be labeled psychotic, since psychosis means the breakdown of an already well-integrated and functioning personality; autism was a way of referring to the most emotionally troubled sorts of youngsters.

I knew virtually nothing about the clinical side of psychoanalysis and even less about autism or Bettelheim's inpatient facilities for treating disturbed children. But I did learn of him as a graduate instructor. A young woman I knew made him sound like a bully, capable of using psychoanalytic concepts abusively; evidently he could publicly interrogate students about their unconscious motives for objecting to this or that he might have said in class. But what sank in to me, from secondhand, was that I did not myself understand the concept of the unconscious or the implications it might have for social philosophy. That year I did a term paper on “Freud and Political Theory” for a course, but it was as yet only a beginning on my part.

I am not sure how typical my own story may be; but since details do matter and carry conviction, my own experience can help a later generation understand how it was that Bettelheim succeeded in eventually becoming such an influential force. During a year of graduate work (1959-60) I spent studying political theory at Oxford, I felt distinctly frustrated by the difficulties in pursuing depth psychology there; although I was attached to Magdalen College, a great and ancient institution, the library there had not a single copy of any of Freud's books. While at Oxford I did read a new book by Alasdair MacIntyre on The Unconscious, and he later published a piece on both Bruno Bettelheim and Erik H. Erikson, which generated further interest on my part (1958; 1965, 38-43).

In the winter of 1962, by then back at Harvard, I had bought and read Stanley M. Elkins's book Slavery ([1959] 1968); this was a period when the civil rights movement was in its heyday, as American liberals began to wake up to how racist its history had been. (It was in 1962 that excerpts from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time [1963] scorched out of the pages of The New Yorker.) Elkins's study, which has subsequently gone into a further edition, was persuasive by virtue of its comparative historical framework; he tried to show how slavery differed in Latin America from the United States, but he also relied on a number of psychological perspectives, one of them being Bettelheim's, to account for the psychological characteristics of the slave system.

As a matter of course we had read in college several firsthand accounts of concentration camps, both those of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union; but here Elkins was arguing that Bettelheim's concepts could help explain what the pre-Civil War plantation South had been like and how it had succeeded in cowing American slaves. In many ways Elkins was a conservative in that he assailed the abolitionists for helping needlessly to destroy the Union. But his approach also seemed challenging and radical. The Cold War was still in full swing, and it was startling to think that American liberalism had ever had anything in common with totalitarianism.

For me Bettelheim's approach was buttressed by the kind of personal impact Erikson, another nonmedical analytic thinker, was then having at Harvard; his section in his Childhood and Society (1950, Ch. 9) on Hitler's youth helped change people's minds about the possibilities of a sophisticated use of psychoanalysis in social science. Its central tenets no longer seemed as farfetched as some of Freud's own efforts at social thinking. By the 1960s Erikson was immensely influential, not only at Harvard but in the general culture; and Bettelheim cited him as authoritative.

If Baldwin's rhetoric had been arresting and Elkins's thesis about racial injustice forming an underside to American history had begun to sink in as part of psychoanalysis's importance for social thought, by the summer of 1963 Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem had become the central controversy on the minds of anyone concerned with political morality. She had covered for The New Yorker the trial of Adolf Eichmann after he had been snatched from Argentina by the Israelis. The tale she told of the destruction of European Jewry during World War II was in itself shocking enough; the morality of war-crime trials was another vexing question; but on top of everything else she accused the leaders of the Jewish councils of having helped make matters worse for their own people: “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six-million people” (1963, 111). Arendt, who like Bettelheim, also held a teaching position at the University of Chicago, had only disdain for psychiatry and could not, like him, call on the authority of science to support her point of view; Arendt's blaming of the victim seemed even more unacceptable than Bettelheim's own detached, first-person account. In the midst of a tremendous row over Arendt, Bettelheim reviewed her book favorably for The New Republic.

Bettelheim's The Informed Heart, ignored publicly by Arendt, had come out in 1960, although I know I did not read it until one of my students, when I was already teaching a lecture course on “Psychology and Politics” at Harvard in the mid-1960s, asked me encouragingly why I was not assigning it. Here Bettelheim had expanded his original 1943 article, excluding some of the more technical concepts and extending his critique of conformity to modern mass society as a whole. In addressing himself to the concentration camps, he remained unremitting: “Psychologically speaking, most prisoners in the extermination camps committed suicide by submitting to death without resistance” (1960, 250-1). Or, as he still later put it, “they had given up their will to live and permitted their death tendencies to engulf them” (Des Pres 1979, 625).

Once again Bettelheim's argument was persuasive by virtue of its being an intellectual autobiography. He reported how, born in 1903, he had grown up in Vienna with the alternative ideologies of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the air; they were rival approaches to improving mankind's lot. The problem of reconciling Marx and Freud was one that still felt alive in the mid-1960s. Herbert Marcuse, author of Eros and Civilization, was then approaching the height of his fame, partly achieved at Fromm's expense; Marcuse had denounced Fromm as a “neo-Freudian” revisionist. Bettelheim, although he and Marcuse came from opposite ideological origins, partly rose in stature as a part of the general debate over Marx and Freud. Bettelheim reported that he had first been decisively drawn to psychoanalysis, with its interest in the inner world of the psyche; it was after he had been placed in a concentration camp where he learned the power of external reality in affecting personality structure.

On being released from the camps, Bettelheim was able to integrate what he had learned from Freud with the lesson the Nazis had taught him. (Only in 1975 did I become emancipated enough to think of putting in print the realization that Bettelheim had failed to specify on what grounds he had been imprisoned and how he managed, apparently with hundreds of other inmates, to get released [Roazen, 149]). If the environment could be used by the Gestapo to tear people down, then why, Bettelheim wondered, could it not also be used for constructive healing purposes? I had not yet read his books Love Is Not Enough (1950) or Truants From Life (1950), which were accounts of his efforts at rehabilitating emotionally disturbed children at his clinic in Chicago.

I had gotten, I thought, the gist of his message, and it was supportive of a belief I cherished in the viability of liberalism. Just as the Nazis had taken away self-determination from people in an effort to break them down, Bettelheim was proposing that severely troubled children needed to be given a special degree of choice within an environment that would be structured enough to ease them in dealing with their problems, and help counteract their earlier life with their parents. While it had seemed to me that it was legitimate for an outcry immediately to have arisen against Arendt, much as I admired all the other moral questions she had eloquently succeeded in raising, I thought Bettelheim had made a memorable and sound contribution to social science. At one and the same time he was defending the key value of autonomy, and also sensitive enough to be aware of the need to explain the realistic if opposite desire for conformity. Bettelheim, like Arendt, was helping to explain the appeals of tyranny.

Part of what I found so attractive in Bettelheim was his pronounced distance from conventional middle-class expectations. He had made a notable splash when a portion of The Informed Heart, in which he attacked the Anne Frank family, had come out ahead of time in a monthly magazine. Bettelheim's position was that the Franks had erred in reacting to the Nazi threat with an air of “business as usual.” Anne had “had a good chance to survive,” Bettelheim contended, “but she would have had to leave her parents” (1979, 248). By the Franks sticking to their commitment to traditional family life, instead of separately going to live in disguise with welcoming gentile families, the Franks had ensured that when they were caught it would be as a group. Bettelheim was insisting that rational survival was at odds with conventional emotional beliefs, and his tough-mindedness was provocative.

During the next few years I read more of Bettelheim. He was co-author of a book called Dynamics of Prejudice in a series started by Max Horkheimer (Bettelheim and Janowitz 1964). From the standpoint of liberalism, prejudice, including anti-Semitism and racism, was irrational; liberals had idealistically assumed that people listened to one another without any barriers but those set by the terms of an argument. Once the Nazis triumphed in previously democratic Germany, however, psychopathological theorizing to explain it seemed appropriate. Totalitarianism in general, and Hitler in particular, appeared to be so off course from what liberalism optimistically expected that psychoanalytic thinking in connection with the concentration camps came as curiously reassuring. One desperately wanted to think that the norm was democracy, and that other forms of authoritarian politics represented an aberration.

Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds (1962) struck me as a powerfully argued bit of theorizing that challenged the then prevailing psychoanalytic conceptions of the nature of male and female. Bettelheim was also questioning the traditional Freudian views on the relation of the individual to society. Instead of seeing human nature as the outcome of conflicts between primitive instincts, Bettelheim, like other revisionist analytic thinkers at the time, pointed to the key role of the ego's striving for integration; failure to achieve ego strength could account for the release of drives that might appear to others as instinctual in nature. Symbolic Wounds was original enough to have gotten Bettelheim in some hot water with orthodox defenders of Freud; by 1960 he acknowledged that his “own breaking away from” the “theoretical models” of psychoanalysis “came only with the writing of Symbolic Wounds” (1960, 32).

His Dialogues With Mothers (1962) also had cut athwart various pieties. Instead of the reassurance so many popularizers seemed eager to be rewarded for handing out, Bettelheim was telling neighborhood mothers of ordinary kids what they were doing wrong. He seemed to flourish on not needing to be accepted. And like many of us in the face of so-called experts about human behavior, the mothers themselves seemed intimidated and awed by his superior knowledge. Arendt herself, in deriding how psychiatrists in Jerusalem had certified Eichmann's “normality,” referred to the proceedings as “the comedy of the soul experts” (1963, 22). That he could be considered normal proved to her not only the worthlessness of the categories of their reasoning but the collapse of Western culture as well. Evil became “banal.” Whatever Bettelheim and she shared in common, clearly they were at odds over psychoanalysis.

For me personally, having in 1964 completed my Ph.D. dissertation on “Freud and Political Theory,” what became imperative was that I learn more about Freud as the founder of psychoanalysis. Books had taught one sort of knowledge but people could teach me something else. The secondary literature about Freud was hidebound with sectarian orthodoxy; and therefore I found conclusively interesting about Bettelheim that he had been brave enough to criticize in print Ernest Jones's authorized biography of Freud. In The American Journal of Sociology Bettelheim had dissected Volumes I and II of Jones's work; Bettelheim thought it an overrated study that communicated a “total misunderstanding of Freud's Vienna which was so important in shaping the man Freud” (1957, 420; cf. also 1991, 39ff). In those days, only Fromm, for example in his Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959), was willing to risk sticking his neck out; his challenge to Jones was immediately answered by orthodox Freudians. But, in his other books Fromm was becoming more and more hortatory, and his political moralisms helped too many to discount his criticisms of Jones. Nobody had ever tried to excommunicate Bettelheim, though, and he kept after Jones. In The New Leader he published a review of the third and final volume of Jones's Freud biography as “a dissenting opinion” from the lavish praise Jones had otherwise received. In the same weekly Bettelheim had appreciatively reviewed Fromm's Sigmund Freud's Mission (1991).

By the mid-1960s, when I was conducting interviews with those who had known Freud or could cast light on the early history of psychoanalysis, it was suggested to me in Chicago that I ought to see Bettelheim himself. In those days it seemed a scandal that, despite all his work with disturbed children, the only standing he had with the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute was as a “non-therapist member.” Organized psychoanalysis has had its features as a trade union, and membership categories continue to be jealously guarded lest outsiders be misled about the extent of anyone's license to practice. But in Bettelheim's case he was obviously more engaged in therapeutic endeavors than almost anybody else in the world of psychoanalysis, which made his official title seem so peculiar.

I knew that Bettelheim had no real personal contact with Freud, although it was easy to anticipate that he had valuable thoughts about the development of the psychoanalytic movement as a whole. His reputation for being tough-minded did not make it easier for me to undertake to see him. I had taken the precaution of talking with a contemporary of mine who as a child had been a patient in Bettelheim's school. In fact this friend gave me an invaluable piece of advice that turned out to be essential to the success of my meeting with Bettelheim. Whatever happened, I had been advised, be sure to level with Bettelheim and tell him the absolute truth. I was prepared then for a formidable presence.

It so happened that Bettelheim kept me waiting outside his office for a good half an hour, in striking contrast to how punctual others had been with me; Freud was not only personally obsessional about time, but practicing analysts have to be inclined that way because of the nature of their kind of work. At the beginning of the interview Bettelheim gruffly announced that his time would have to be accordingly brief since he alleged that I had been late; if he had been right, my offense would have been grave. Thinking of my friend's advice on how to handle Bettelheim, I screwed up my courage and firmly stated that I had been right on time but that he himself had been tardy. I had nothing to lose and he seemed rude. The result was that he checked his appointment calendar, straightforwardly acknowledged his mistake (without any effort to use charm), and the interview then proceeded on a sound human footing for the full time he had originally allotted me. In later years, this meeting with him stood out in my mind for how exceptionally brilliant and insightful he had been, about not only Freud but the whole history of psychoanalysis. And his stature grew for me as I saw many dozens of other people with which to compare him. (In hindsight, knowing now how he ended his own life, it has to seem curious that he chose with me to interpret the Viennese analyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth's murder by her nephew as “psychologically” a suicide.)

My next contact with Bettelheim was of a different sort; in 1969 I reviewed his The Children of the Dream for the Sunday New York Times (Roazen 1990, 269-272). Bettelheim had gone to Israel for a brief seven weeks in order to study kibbutz life. I had no doubt then, nor now, that Bettelheim went there with his head crammed with theories. But he freely admitted that his report was personal and impressionistic. I was almost wholly uncritical because once again he seemed to me so full of ideas, and he sent me a nice thank-you note. A university press wrote me suggesting I do a book about Bettelheim, but I doubt I even answered the inquiry since I felt inhibited about undertaking such a project because of something indefinably unpleasant connected with Bettelheim.

I thought it a strength in Bettelheim that he did not take for granted the special virtues of middle-class life and that he made himself a critic of the standards of contemporary culture. The communal method of education described as having taken place on the Israeli kibbutz, although it involved only a small fraction of Israel's whole population, inevitably seemed to Bettelheim an extraordinary social experiment. He had at hand a modern example with which to reopen the ancient question of the extent to which people are responsible for creating society, or society in turn shapes its members.

Bettelheim's own experience with institutionally rearing children in Chicago was at odds with traditional claims that to raise children in groups is bound to be damaging to their mental health. To bring the kibbutz experiment even closer ideologically to Bettelheim, the founders of the kibbutz movement were relying on a variant of Freudian teachings. They wanted to abolish the powerful role of the Eastern-European ghetto mother and allow the community itself to assume the overall functions of the direction and control of the lives of its children. Parents were to play only the most distant role in the upbringing of their children.

Bettelheim claimed to have found in the kibbutzim an absence of all the problems that most seem to distress young adults elsewhere, such as drug addiction and juvenile delinquency. Yet he was ruthless about pursuing the psychological consequences of kibbutz life. If the Israelis succeeded in getting rid of some of the worst aspects of the hostility and ambivalence between parent and child, which we unfortunately experience, they did so at a price; for they simultaneously did away with the advantages of middle-class culture, for example in destroying the intimacy and deep attachments of traditional family life. Bettelheim claimed that, among those who grew up as members of the kibbutz, he observed an emotional flattening out and fear of deep attachments, and he faulted them for being unable to be fully autonomous as feeling human beings. Whatever gains there were in kibbutz culture Bettelheim was determined to point out the losses as well, especially when they were unanticipated ones.

At the time I wrote my favorable review of The Children of the Dream, I did not yet have any children of my own. Once I became a parent only a couple of years later, I grew a good deal more skeptical about Bettelheim's outsider approach to traditional family life, as well as Anna Freud's own criticisms of what she called “biological” as opposed to “psychological” parenting. Freud's whole school of thought endorsed the idea that neutral observers can know best what children need; and while it is sometimes true that under special circumstances a detached party can benefit from distance to make valid recommendations that natural parents may use to advantage, once I had my own experience as a parent I found it harder not to be suspicious of all pretenses to expertness in an area of thinking so filled with conflicting ideological convictions. I could scarcely share the belief underlying Bettelheim's work and that of Freud's daughter Anna as well, that parents can be considered both bad and unnecessary. Bettelheim in particular, with his positive recommendations, seemed to share disquieting similarities with the kind of behavioristic psychologizing propagated by B. F. Skinner.

It has rarely been noted how some of Freud's own child-rearing advice shared remarkable similarities with that of a contemporary behaviorist John B. Watson. Despite what look like inherently incompatible differences, Freud and Watson had many cultural points of view in common. But Freud remained fundamentally committed to a biologistic orientation and never gave up his special commitment to the significance of our phylogenetic inheritance. And when he wrote about the meaning of Oedipus's crimes, after all he was illustrating the power of biological destiny: Oedipus fled from his foster parents in Corinth out of fear of parricide and incest.

Bettelheim's adaptation of psychoanalytic teaching came from his being used to dealing therapeutically with disturbed children in desperate straights, and therefore with parents who were at the end of their rope. One assumes optimistically that on no other grounds would any parent ever agree to the stringent terms Bettelheim exacted: The parents had to agree that the children never return to their original families but instead remain at the school, if only at night, even after they were able to pursue a normal public education.

I have more and more come to question the legitimacy of our relying on generalizations for so-called normal children, when the theories in question are derived from dealing with parenting that has misfired. So often what is at issue are differing moral and ethical considerations; no so-called experts can legitimately make judgments of this sort for us, much less confidently preach about the state of our general culture. There is a limit that I think should be put to all different psychopathological schools of thought, entirely aside from the narrow question, which is still a fundamental one, of what one thinks about the ethics of treating small children by means of psychotherapy, when one knows how inevitably it has to involve an invasion of a delicate and precious area of privacy. It makes a difference whether such an intrusion is undertaken with humility and as a cautious last resort.

Again, these are questions and skeptical convictions that came to my mind only twenty years later. I do remember, however, not long after The Children of the Dream was published being distressed at seeing Bettelheim's emotional response to an anti-Vietnam war sit-in at the University of Chicago. Although I was strongly against that war, I did not believe in the propriety of such student tactics; but then I did not think any of those middle-class kids could fairly be called, as Bettelheim publicly did at the time, neo-Nazis. His description of student activists as “very, very sick,” “paranoiacs,” who were trying to “beat down father to show they are a big boy,” (Lemisch 1975, 96, 137) seemed to me both crude and polemical, substituting clinical categories for strictly political ones. It looked like Bettelheim was reliving something inside his own head and not appreciating the special circumstances in America that he was, in reality, confronted with.

It was, and here I am confessing my own limitations, not life or experience but rather a book that finally shook my confidence in Bettelheim. He had continued to publish about his orthogenic school; A Home for the Heart, for example, appeared in 1974. I remember noticing that the pictures on Bettelheim's book jackets, where he smiled and looked friendly, seemed oddly incongruous with the man I admired and the fiercely bold spirit I thought I perceived there.

Terence Des Pres's The Survivor (1976) shook me out of my dogmatic slumbers, and Bettelheim's response to it finally succeeded in disillusioning me. For years I had been assigning The Informed Heart to my undergraduates, and then Des Pres came along challenging Bettelheim's whole thesis. I found Des Pres's The Survivor beautifully written and movingly argued, and although he did not enjoy the credibility of ever having himself been in a concentration camp, he relied on a range of first-hand literature in order to confront Bettelheim.

Throughout The Survivor Des Pres criticized Bettelheim for having supposed that it was correct to have thought that the prisoners ever regressed to infantilism. Des Pres believed that the survivors should be viewed as reminders not of human weakness but of evil circumstances that were objectively powerful. Both the Nazis and Stalin's regime subjected prisoners to filth for the sake of humiliation and debasement. Des Pres argued that prisoner behavior in response to such circumstances was not childish but rather a heroic response to dreadful necessities. He cited one camp where the inmates burned it down and found throughout the literature instances of people who somehow managed to maintain their inward sanctity. Resistance took subtle shapes, and Des Pres explored the way human dignity endured in the form of freedom from the entire control by external forces. Instead of blaming the victims for imitating the conduct of their captors, Des Pres highlighted how life's resiliency copes with the obstacle of absolute power. Survivors helped one another, engaged in acts of sabotage, and from Buchenwald made contact with the Allies for a bombing raid on SS parts of the camp.

Des Pres pointed out that Bettelheim was imprisoned during a special period when criminals among inmates wielded power. He disputed Bettelheim's notion that social bonding among prisoners was absent; nor was it true, Des Pres argued, that they did not hate their oppressors and did not sometimes revolt. According to Des Pres, Bettelheim had felt superior to his fellow sufferers, and his account was fatally marred by his egotistical obsession with autonomy that blinded him to the extent of the mutual support that existed within the camps.

If Des Pres's book took me by storm, I was equally stunned by Bettelheim's response. He published a long article in The New Yorker, ostensibly occasioned by the appearance of Lina Wertmüller's movie Seven Beauties (1976, 31-52; cf. 1979). Having read Des Pres's The Survivor, however, it was apparent to me that Bettelheim was only using the occasion of the movie as a suitable platform to get back at Des Pres. Much of Bettelheim's article was taken up with Des Pres's book, although he begins and ends it by trashing the Wertmüller movie. Since Bettelheim later reprinted his piece in his Surviving and Other Essays (1979), after he had won widespread acclaim for his National Book Award-winning The Uses of Enchantment (1976), a study of fairy tales, I can leave it to the reader to weigh and assess the merits of Bettelheim's points against Des Pres. For myself, I thought Bettelheim was retracting, without acknowledging doing so, some of the most controversial parts of his 1943 piece. But Bettelheim's response to Des Pres, as impassioned and eloquent as it was, bore no reasonable relationship to anything that I had read in The Survivor.

If Bettelheim could so distort Des Pres's text, how reliable could he be taken to have been concerning the concentration camps—a world that I had never seen? As disquieting as anything was the fact that at no point in his new article did Bettelheim let the reader know that he was in fact the central object of Des Pres's whole argument. The offense was, I thought, compounded by the fact that, given the place that Bettelheim had chosen to review The Survivor, Des Pres had no right of reply.

In 1979 Des Pres, who was to die prematurely, published an article called “The Bettelheim Problem” in the quarterly Social Research. This became his final retort. Des Pres now linked Bettelheim's theories about child-rearing to the “autistic and schizophrenic reactions” Bettelheim had supposedly observed among adults in the concentration camps. Furthermore, Des Pres stressed how frequently Bettelheim as a therapist saw himself at odds with parents who were described by Bettelheim as psychologically the destroyers of their offspring.

Although my own change of opinion about Bettelheim was striking, still I continued to assign his The Informed Heart alongside with Des Pres's book as an alternative reading option. But my mind was free to reconsider even more of Bettelheim's thinking. I had begun to question the unspoken screening process that he had used, which might have helped select out for acceptance those patients for his school who were most likely to benefit from his particular psychological approach; that might help explain his implausible-sounding claim that eighty percent of the children admitted to his facility had recovered.

Then, when I was on a panel with a famous neurologist at a professional conference, the subject of autism came up. I was informed in no uncertain terms that Bettelheim had been responsible for perpetrating a great deal of misinformation and consequent social damage. For the scientific evidence has become overwhelming that genuine autistic problems have to be accounted for by organic factors. And therefore Bettelheim's own exclusively psychogenic approach to autism left many anguished parents with an unnecessary burden of guilt feelings.

While Bettelheim never explicitly retracted any of his earlier therapeutic goals, if one carefully watches a television series made about Bettelheim in the mid-1980s, he can be seen deliberately skirting away from his initial claims to have been treating autistic children. But the average viewer will not be apt to notice the fine distinctions that Bettelheim was now making. Nor did the general reading public ever seem to realize how thoroughly Bettelheim's earliest pretensions had been discredited. In an autobiographical piece “How I Learned About Psychoanalysis,” which appeared in 1989, he was talking about having treated “psychotic children” (1991, 34), even though this may remain a contradiction in terms, as well as beg the question of the biochemical basis of psychosis.

In reflecting on the slippery issue of terminology, I cannot help being reminded of how, when I interviewed Bettelheim, he mentioned that Dr. Annie Reich was “a good friend” of his. Since she had once been married to Wilhelm Reich, I later interviewed her. She informed me in passing, and without any special friendly feelings but just when Bettelheim's name came up, that he had never had any psychoanalytic training in Vienna but had worked there in his father's factory. Far from being any kind of friend of Bettelheim's, she must have known how damaging such a contention could be. In a 1988 interview, which only appeared after Bettelheim's death, he indicated that he had just started a training analysis when the Nazis first entered Austria (1991, Vol. 28, 66).

According to Laura Fermi's book on the emigration to America of the continental intelligentsia, Bettelheim's early career in Vienna was “in aesthetics” (1968, 169). If it had once been startling that he was listed as a “non-therapist” member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, in hindsight one has to wonder not only about his credentials for treating children, but how he could ever have gotten to be called any kind of psychoanalyst. In fairness to Bettelheim, I can think of other people in psychoanalysis who went on to practice, especially with children, without any formal training (Roazen 1990). And unfortunately it is true that having graduated from a training facility is no guarantee of special insightfulness. Still, his having only had personal analysis ought not, at least for someone of Bettelheim's generation in the field, to have been enough to have sufficed.

Nevertheless, for years Bettelheim's position in the general culture seemed to be preeminent. A translation of his The Empty Fortress sold more than 100,000 copies in France (Roudinesco 1990, 623). Despite whatever grounds for uneasiness about him there were, he remained much feared as a book reviewer. He handled books with unchallenged authority, and more than occasional acerbity, for the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Review of Books.

In 1982 he published in The New Yorker what I regarded as a tendentious piece attacking the English translations of Freud, which then appeared as a book in his Freud and Man's Soul (1982). Bettelheim tried to blame the medical monopoly of psychoanalysis in America on the translation of Freud's texts, while in reality the translators themselves had no medical qualifications. Bettelheim was using the occasion to make a valuable defense of humanism. But it was a piece of Jesuitical reasoning for Bettelheim to use as the epigraph to Freud and Man's Soul a passage from a letter of Freud's in which he says that “psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.” That comment has to be understood as one of Freud's ironies; he meant that patients transfer emotional feelings onto their analysts, and through the analyst's rationally interpreting that form of transference (or unrequited love) psychoanalysis can have a therapeutic impact. Bettelheim continued to publish; in 1982 he was author of On Learning to Read, and then in 1987 his A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing came out.

I had heard through the grapevine that he had remained unhappy ever since his wife died in 1984. But I was surprised on March 14, 1990, to read on the front-page of the New York Times that Bettelheim had passed away. At the age of eighty-six there could be no special shock about such mortality; but the story was complicated in Bettelheim's case because while I habitually regard the New York Times as authoritative, that same day the Toronto newspapers were claiming that he had committed suicide. On March 15 the New York Times ran an additional story, on an inside page (16), describing the particulars of Bettelheim's self-inflicted death on the fifty-second anniversary of the day the Nazis invaded Austria.

Bettelheim had been in low spirits for some time and suffered from a variety of physical ailments. He had three children, two daughters and a son. Evidently. Bettelheim, who after three decades at his orthogenic school retired in 1943 to California, had a serious falling out near his end with his daughter on the West Coast. He gave up his spacious apartment there and moved to a retirement home on the East Coast to be near his other daughter. Things got no better for him. He left a note that remains undisclosed, took some pills along with alcohol, and placed a plastic bag over his head, asphyxiating himself.

I remember once when interviewing Eva Rosenfeld, one of Freud's former patients who was also a friend of his family, that the subject of Freud and suicide came up. It is true that Freud, after enduring a painful cancer of the jaw for sixteen years, which included numerous operations, finally instructed his personal physician that it was pointless at the age of eighty-three to struggle on further, and a lethal dosage of morphine was mercifully administered. If anything, Freud had been allowed to go on too long; his doctor remained resentful and had wanted to do something to help weeks earlier, but Freud's daughter Anna, who was a key decision-maker at the time, wanted her father to go on and on.

Eva Rosenfeld quoted to me Freud's sister-in-law Minna as having once proudly said of him: “any ordinary man” would have done away with himself years ago. Eva said she thought that suicide was out of the question for Freud, since such a death would have meant that no one would ever take his books seriously. So when Bettelheim died, I did wonder whether he had not cared enough for his own publications. I had always thought that much of his work was written too flatly, as if he were not personally present in it; a writer needs to invest his work with a certain kind of narcissism. As chance would have it, I met someone just after Bettelheim's death whose wife, pregnant with their first child, was reading A Good Enough Parent at her bedside; the young husband was tactful enough not to alert his wife to the tale of the circumstances of Bettelheim's death. His suicide does cast a shadow over the admiration his work earned, especially since he did so contentiously say of the concentration camp victims that “millions, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death” (quoted in Des Pres, 644).

It seems to me hardly possible to establish that suicide is always morally wrong, especially in someone so elderly, and yet I do believe, when children are being left behind, that there ought to be a serious moral presumption against it. I find myself in thorough sympathy with one of the sayings attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein, three of whose brothers killed themselves: “if suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed.”

It ought, I think, to be seriously troubling how many psychoanalysts have ended up as suicides (that physicians kill themselves more than statistically expectable is a separate matter). Why analysts should do so seems to me to pose a special problem, perhaps related to unrealistic expectations of what life can ideally be like. The list of those analysts who have committed suicide is awesome; among those who killed themselves are Edward Bibring, Paul Federn, Johann Honegger, Max Kahane, Karl Landauer, Monroe Meyer, Sophie Morgenstern, Martin Peck, Tatiana Rosenthal, Karl Schrötter, Herbert Silberer, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Karin Stephen, Wilhelm Stekel, and Victor Tausk. Given the frequency of medical cover-ups about suicides, it is reasonable to assume that there are even more such deaths among analysts than we already know about.

Perhaps it is a mistake to place Bettelheim's name in any such lineup of analysts who have killed themselves. The most charitable outlook might be to see him instead in the context of concentration camp survivors, who had to live out their lives as if, according to the image proposed by historian Saul Friedlander, they contained “shards of steel,” (quoted in Fisher, 9) that would never heal. It may be a tribute to Bettelheim's strength of will that he managed to stave off for as long as he did what tragically appears to be an all too prevalent outcome for those who personally endured the Holocaust.

However Bettelheim's reputation may turn out to be affected by the way he chose to die, it is terrible to learn what we have been told about him since then. The Washington Post ran a long article (Pekow) August 26, 1990, alleging that former patients at Bettelheim's school in Chicago claimed he was abusive and violent, screaming and hitting children (some of whom suffered from neurological deficits) in his charge. Newsweek almost immediately ran a story about the matter (Sept. 10, 1990; 59-60), citing further evidence along the same lines. It turns out that his eventual successor as head of the school put a ban on corporal punishment and installed shower curtains. (Bettelheim is said to have dragged a young woman by the hair from a shower, striking her.)

For me one of the most troubling aspects of the Newsweek piece was the weak defense of Bettelheim put up by some former staff members of his. It is not enough for a disciple (and former patient) to maintain now, “He was a son of a bitch. But he was also a genius” (60). It is dreadful to think that such abuses could have been practiced for so many years and either no staff members had the courage to speak out or else patients who complained were not believed. Are those who participated in running Bettelheim's facility legally or professionally still liable for what once went on?

An appalling account of therapeutic tyranny, by a former patient at Bettelheim's orthogenic school, appeared in Commentary (Angres 1990, 26-30). The New York Times has published a similar story, and letters to the editor, again along the same lines, have appeared both in Commentary (Feb. 1991, 6-12) and the New York Times (Nov. 1990; 6; Nov. 20, 1990, A14; cf also Society July/Aug., 1991, 6-9). A series of letters have also appeared in the University of Chicago's alumni Magazine; although some wrote in Bettelheim's defense for what he had meant to them as a teacher and therapist, on the whole people were bent on repudiating him, demanding to know how the university had ever allowed such practices to go on, and questioning the propriety of going through with the idea of naming a center in Bettelheim's honor (Summer 1990, 31-2; October 1990, 3-4; December 1990, 3-4; February 1991, 5-6).

Presumably we have not heard the end of this. It is surely distasteful to have material of this sort appearing when Bettelheim is no longer around to defend himself. A splendid memorial tribute to Bettelheim appeared in the Partisan Review¹ (Fisher 1990, 627-9), but the question of the physical abuse of children did not arise in it at all. Nothing can, or should, be able to take away from the work Bettelheim published. He was original, challenging, and provocative; his books and articles deserve to be evaluated on their own merits. Instead, Newsweek has run a new story about Bettelheim allegedly plagiarizing his work on fairy tales (Feb. 18, 1991, 75; Dundes 1991, 74-83). I suspect that unless something gets done soon in Bettelheim's behalf, and I cannot say who could be in a position to be able to do it, his reputation may never recover. At least one biography of Bettelheim has been announced as in the works, two more have been rumored. One hopes that such books will help put in perspective the distressing aspects to Bettelheim's career.

It is normal and even obligatory for writers and thinkers to be re-evaluated after they have died, and it is often the case that they go into an irreversible decline. In contrast, Hannah Arendt's own death in 1975 brought forth a paen of laudatory articles, and her stature has been climbing ever since. She may have despised psychoanalytic thinking, and omitted reference to Bettelheim when she wrote about the concentration camps, but rather like George Orwell who rejected Freud while freely making use of his psychology in 1984, (Roazen 1990, Encountering Freud …, 294-308), Arendt's own works reflected our culture's involvement in the Freudian perspective. Bettelheim did as much as anyone to propagandize that outlook. Even if one sets Freud aside, the most anti-psychological texts usually conceal an unspoken line of psychological reasoning.

But with all these allegations about Bettelheim and his suicide to boot, one does not know what his contribution adds up to. While Arendt's ideas in Eichmam in Jerusalem kicked off an immediate storm of controversy, there has been so little tolerance of give and take within the field of psychoanalysis that few people even know how Des Pres had questioned Bettelheim. For myself, there was also the problem of how Bettelheim had chosen to handle the criticism by Des Pres; and then came the shock of Bettelheim's suicide.

Other people have bravely faced a difficult old age. Creativity, often with the help of denial, extends to helping cope with the problem of aging. Even Arthur Koestler's suicide seems to me not to tarnish his own work in the same way as it does Bettelheim's because one expects something different of a psychoanalyst, especially one who had written so disparagingly about the behavior of other concentration camp inmates. It seems in keeping that Bettelheim evidently did not contact members of the Hemlock Society (Fisher, 4), for that would be to have made an admission of human comradeship; but he used a technique (the plastic bag) recommended by Hemlock people. Bettelheim's death by asphyxiation meant, I am told, a particularly gruesome body would be left for those who found it.

On top of everything else, the accusations of physical abuse of his patients leave my mind numbed, since I feel somehow complicit with him in having relied on his books in my classes for so many years. I would imagine that the stories about his conduct are bound to damage all residential psychotherapeutic treatment centers for children. In hindsight, a sentence of Bettelheim's about Carl G. Jung's misconduct in having had an affair with a patient, Sabina Spielrein, who went on to become an analyst, does sound like a rationalization of Bettelheim's own special sort of delinquency: “However questionable Jung's behavior was from a moral point of view—however unorthodox, even disreputable it may have been—somehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her.” In contrast to Bettelheim's viewpoint, a contemporary Italian analyst has written me: “The erotication of the process of transference and countertransference is, more than anything else, an unconscious misalliance, collusion, that is set in motion in order to avoid the surfacing of a very aggressive transference. Only a badly trained analyst is not aware of the truth of such a mechanism” (Speziale-Bagliacca 1991). It is hoped that Bettelheim's own misbehavior will attract interpretive attention in the professional literature.

Bettelheim had written so many interesting books that it had reinforced my predisposition in favor of nonmedical analysts. Now I wonder whether perhaps Arendt and others within my field of political science were more sound than I like to think in being so dismissive of psychoanalysis. I am bound to feel betrayed, if only because I had in print been proud to point out some psychoanalytic precursors to Bettelheim's individual theses ([1969] 1990, XXXV, 175, 195). With a career like Bettelheim's in mind I have to worry self-critically whether my time devoted to studying the history of psychoanalysis has been well spent.

There is enough smoke surrounding Bettelheim now that there is reason to suspect the existence of genuine fire. His fall would appear to be so precipitous as to be unprecedented. Louis Althusser's reputation, at least in North American academic circles, suffered a similar fate when he murdered his wife. And I can remember being sadly disillusioned when it turned out that Erik H. Erikson had been guilty of an act of autobiographical bad faith about his Jewish ancestry, but Erikson's glossing over his religious past pales in comparison with the apparently uncontestable charge of the abuses at Bettelheim's orthogenic school. The only vaguely comparable recent story of the decline of a substantial reputation that I can think of has to do with the posthumous revelation that Paul de Man as a young man in Belgium published anti-Semitic newspaper articles. In de Man's case his work had become central to a whole school of literary criticism, and defenders have arisen to launch years of debate over the controversy now associated with him. One can only wonder what we have in store for us concerning Bruno Bettelheim (Zimmerman 1991).

Note

1. But Cf. Fisher's article when reprinted in The Psychohistory Review (19:2, 255-261, esp. 259-260).

Works Cited

Angres, Ronald. 1990. “Who, really, was Bruno Bettelheim?” in Commentary, October.

Arendt, Helen. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Viking Press.

Baldwin, James. 1963. The fire next time. New York: Dial Press.

Bernstein, Richard. 1991. “Bruno Bettelheim” in Commentary, February.

———. 1990. “Accusations of abuse haunt the legacy of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim” in Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, Nov. 4.

———. 1990. “Bruno Bettelheim” in New York Times, Nov. 20. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1991. “Last thoughts on therapy” in Society, March/April, Vol. 28.

———. 1991. “Two views of Freud” in Freud's Vienna and other essays. New York: Vintage.

———. 1987. A good enough parent: A book on child-rearing. New York: Knopf.

———. 1982. Freud and man's soul. New York: Knopf.

———. 1979. Surviving and other essays. New York: Knopf.

———. 1976. “Reflections” in The New Yorker, Aug. 2.

———. 1976. The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. New York: Knopf.

———. 1974. A home for the heart. New York: Knopf.

———. 1962. Dialogue with mothers. New York: The Free Press.

———. 1962. Symbolic wounds: Puberty rites and the envious male. New York: Collier Books.

———. 1960. The informed heart: Autonomy in a mass age. Glencoe: The Free Press.

———. 1958. “Ernest Jones's Freud: A dissenting opinion” in The New York leader, Vol. 41, May 19.

———. 1957. “Book Review of Jones's The life and work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. I & II” in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62.

———. 1955. Truants from life. New York: The Free Press.

———. 1950. Love is not enough. New York: The Free Press.

———. 1943. “Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations” in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 38.

Bettelheim, Bruno and Morris Janowitz. 1964. Social change and prejudice, including Dynamics of prejudice. New York: The Free Press.

Darnton, Nina. 1990. “Beno Brutalheim?” in Newsweek, Sept. 10.

Des Pres, Terence. 1979. “The Bettelheim Problem” in Social Research, Vol. 46.

———. 1976. The survivor: An anatomy of life in the death camps. New York: Oxford Press.

Dundes, Alan. 1991. “Bruno Bettelheim's uses of enchantment and the abuses of scholarship” in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 104.

Elkins, Stanley M. [1959] 1968. Slavery: A problem in American institutional and intellectual history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Erikson, Erik H. 1950. Childhood and society. New York: Norton.

Fermi, Laura. 1968. Illustrious immigrants: The intellectual migration from Europe, 1930-41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fisher, David James. “Some intimate perceptions of Bettelheim's suicide,” unpublished manuscript.

———. 1991. “Homage to Bettelheim (1903-1990)” in The Psychohistory Review, 19:2.

———. 1990. “Homage to Bettelheim (1903-1990)” in Partisan Review.

Freud, Anna. 1937. The ego and the mechanisms of defense. London: The Hogarth Press.

Fromm, Erich. 1959. Sigmund Freud's mission: An analysis of his personality and influence. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Lemisch, Jesse. 1975. On active service in war and peace. Toronto: New Hogtown Press.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1965. “The psychoanalysts” in Encounter, Vol. 24, May.

———. 1958. The unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Newsweek. 1991. Feb. 18.

New York Times. 1990. Inside article on Bettelheim death.

Pekow, Charles. 1990. “The other Dr. Bettelheim” in Washington Post, Aug. 26.

Roazen, Paul. 1991. Encountering Freud: The politics and histories of psychoanalysis. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.

———. 1990. “Tola Rank” in Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 18.

———. [1969] 1990. Brother animal: The story of Freud and Tausk. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.

———. 1975. “Psychology and politics” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 12.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1990. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. Translated by Jeffrey Melhman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Society. 1991. July/August.

Speziale-Bagliacca, Robert. 1991.

University of Chicago Magazine. 1991. Winter.

———. 1990. Summer, October, December.

Zimmerman, D. Patrick. 1991. “The clinical thought of Bruno Bettelheim: A critical historical review” in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Vol. 14.