THE suicide of Bruno Bettelheim in March 1990 triggered an astonishing avalanche of odium. A tiny band of tenacious former patients accused the renowned child psychologist of every sort of wickedness short of conducting Satanic rites. In the ensuing media furore, Bettelheim was portrayed as nothing more than a pompous Viennese fraud who terrorised colleagues, plagiarised research, falsified his psychoanalytic credentials and randomly mugged the children in his care. His reputation rapidly fell into ruins.
Yet a mystery persisted as to how these "revelations" squared with the life of a fierce maverick who indisputably published 16 books, helped a horde of disturbed children at his Orthogenic School in Chicago, and locked horns with many powerful authorities in controversies ranging from behaviour in concentration camps (where he spent a terrible year), through causes of autism, to the emotional value of fairy tales. Bullies don't go around picking fights with other bullies. It simply didn't figure.
So a ravening pack of biographers (including, be warned, moi) began an intense round of leap frog over three continents to ransack archives and interrogate Bettelheim's friends and foes. Nina Sutton, an English journalist based in Paris, is first to cross the finish line. Although lacking any background in social sciences, psychoanalysis, child therapy or philosophy, she compensates, as a good reporter will, by throwing absolutely everything she learned into her account, which makes for quite a contradictory reportorial stew because she is determined to preserve an image of Bettelheim as an imperious conman, no matter what.
Still, the biography reads as if Sutton underwent a Cry reluctant change of heart halfway through a cheerful hatchet job. The halves fail to cohere because she cannot explain how the social climbing phoney she portrays in Austria transforms into what she admits was a superb psychologist once he touches American shores after his release from Buchenwald in 1939. The second half does show some appreciation of his brilliance (even when he was wrong) as both healer and as social critic. Indeed, the best passages result when Sutton is forced to take seriously Bettelheim's staff members and many ex patients who attest to how wildly exaggerated the charges of abuse are. The book positively sparkles when quoting insights culled from Bettelheim's correspondence. And why not? Bettelheim is pretty hard to beat.
Sutton earnestly tries to be balanced but is hobbled at the start by relying on the testimony by Bettelheim's first wife, Gina (his second wife died in the mid 1980s), who is treated as a veritable sage, while the family of Bruno's analyst (the late Richard Sterba) decline to be interviewed and thereupon are accused of being "uneasy" about their parents' complicity in perpetrating the fraud Sutton believes Bettelheim to be.
Sutton fills considerable gaps with so many "must have been"s and "it is possible"s that I lost count. Some speculation is unavoidable but hers invariably counts against him. Whenever Bettelheim's account is at odds with anyone else's, it is he who must be wrong or else a liar. This prosecutional style gets a bit wearying and even absurd. What is one to make of the charge that Bettelheim "betrayed a concern for coherence and order" in his writing? An eminent friend and colleague is "characteristically frank" but Bettelheim is "brutal". You get the idea.
CURIOUSLY, one can dispel most of his supposedly dark doings with evidence elsewhere in this biography. Bettelheim was an ostentatious snob but "despised pretence and pedantry". He was a dogmatist but questioned everything (including, of course, psychoanalysis). He was gnawed by feelings of fraud but also was "at peace with himself". Indeed, he was that most singular fraud, one who performed his work brilliantly. One could go on and on in this confounding vein. In a discussion of the concentration camps, Sutton mentions and then ignores Bettelheim's vital caveat that "my business is not with the dead but with the living"; that is, his intent was not to judge fellow prisoners but rather to alert contemporary audiences as how to avoid a replay of Nazism. Sutton uses Jewish self hatred - a prime discrediting device - sparingly but nonetheless suggests it was at work within him.
nonetheless suggests it as at work within him.
Refreshingly, she approaches with some caution the fact of his slapping children at the Orthogenic School. This he did in lieu of plunging kids into isolation rooms, leather restraints, and chemical strait jackets, which all have their own drawbacks. One may vehemently disagree with his choice - as I do - but he was apparently controlled and reasoned in dispensing these cuffs. The author is accurate about Bettelheim playing the role of "reassuring enemy" and "lightning rod", while a staff whom he painstakingly assembled and trained provided a loving and supportive milieu. Sutton eventually agrees that the charges of abusiveness which engendered her chariness towards Bettelheim are vastly overblown.
However, her judgments on the Orthogenic School, on Bettelheim's research in Israel on infantile autism, and his family life are generally on the mark. So this book, for all its flaws, is a useful start toward a re evaluation. What may dawn on careful readers who follow the evidence and not her denigrating tone is a notion that Sutton deems unthinkable: that Bettelheim may well have been the real thing all along. In sum, this is the best biography of a caricature of Bettelheim that one can expect.
