Bruno Bettelheim: a brilliant psychologist?

Bruno Bettelheim 

Tantor media

Bruno Bettelheim (1903–90) was born in Vienna, son of a middle-class Jewish lumber merchant. He entered Vienna Uni, but was forced to leave to take over his fam­ily business when his father sickened. In 1930, he married school-teacher Gina Al­stadt, a dis­ciple of Anna Freud.

During the 1930s Bruno and Gina took care of an autistic child who lived in their Vienna home for 7 years. After 10 years, Bettelheim returned to his education, earning a PhD in 1938, among the last Jews award­ed a doc­torate before the Nazis annexed Austria in the 1938 Anschluss.

In the late 1930s, Bettelheim travelled between German state hospitals during the infamous Disabled Euthanasia Programme, the st­art of his re­search in mental patients. He became an accredit­ed ther­ap­ist and return­ed to Austria. But Bettelheim was arr­ested in 1939 by the Gestapo and spent 10.5 months in­ Dachau and then Buchenwald con­cen­trat­ion camps. In the camps, he supervised the prison­ers' mental health. His rel­ease occ­ur­red just prior to WW2 but he lost everything and his wife left.

Empty Fort­ress: Infant­ile Autism and the Birth of the Self, 1967

Bettelheim married Ger­trude Weinfeld in 1941 and had 3 children. After his release, Bettelheim ?moved to Australia in 1939, and then to the U.S in 1943, becoming a naturalised cit­izen there. He sur­v­ived by teach­ing art history, German literature and psychol­ogy.

He wrote his concentration camps experiences in Indiv­idual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations (1943). He analysed camp in­mat­es’ beh­aviour, studying the effects of horror on the prison­ers, prison guards and himself. Bettel­heim used psychoan­al­ytic princip­les, includ­ing Anna Freud's concept of iden­t­ification with the aggres­sor, to explain why many prisoners took on the val­ues of their tort­urers to survive. He saw many inmates falling prey to Vic­tim Guilt.

In 1945 Gen Eisenhower asked his officers in Europe to read the article, to prepare for the shock of dealing with concentration camp survivors.

Bettelheim’s work had to be analysed in the context of great soc­ial change, from the Bolshevik Revolution and WW1, to Nazism and WW2. He was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and studied the work of Carl Jung and Anna Freud. Bettel­heim was also interested in the effect of social systems on individuals.

This Prof of Psychology taught at Chicago Uni from 1944 until re­tirement (1973). The most signific­ant part of Bettelheim's career was as Director of Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a home for emotion­ally disturb­ed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychol­ogy, and his milieu ther­apy was widely used at the Orthog­enic School. His world famous therapy is still widely used in treat­ing em­ot­ion­ally dist­urbed children. There he created a therap­eut­ic environment that supported severely disturbed children, gen­erally human­ising their treatments. The rooms were clean, the child­ren were free to move around and the staff had to accept ALL children’s behaviour. Via his lectures and books Bettel­heim inspired generations of parents to apply psych­ol­ogical principles to their child rearing.

In 1960 Bruno published The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, explaining the relationship between the external en­vironment and mental disorder. He learned from his concen­tra­t­ion camp exp­er­iences where he saw normal people going in­sane in the dehuman­is­ing environment. Bettelheim concluded that only a positive env­ir­on­ment could influen­ce one’s sanity and remedy mental disorders.

He compared his post-camp attempts to preserve a sense of autonomy, in­tegrity and personal freedom Vs life in modern, mass society. Mass U.S or Western Europe societies were dehumanising and depers­on­alising. People had to struggle to maintain their sanity, much like inmates in the camp

   

A Good Enough Parent : A Book on Child-Rearing

1987

His best selling book was Uses of Enchantment: Meaning & Importance of Fairy Tales (1976). There he used Freud­ian psychology to analyse the healthy effects of fairy tales on children’s psyches. It was aw­ar­ded the 1977 Nat­ional Book Award for Con­t­emporary Thought. [NB his psych­o­­an­alytical treatise on fairy tales was said to have been plagiarised].

Bettelheim believed autism had no organic basis; rather that autic children behaved like help­less concentrat­ion camp inmates. The main reason was the negative par­ental interaction with infants dur­ing crit­ical stages in their development. Such children learn­ed to blame themselves for their families’ negative atmos­ph­ere, and withdrew into fantasy worlds. It was mainly the result of upbringing by mothers (and fathers?) who did not want their children to live with them. This in turn caused them to restrict contact with them and failed to establish an em­otional connection.

Bettelheim pres­ented a complex explanation in psych­ological terms, der­ived from the qualitative inv­estigation of clinical cases in his book: The Empty Fort­ress: Infant­ile Autism and the Birth of the Self (1967).

His Refrigerator Mother Theory recognised the association bet­ween the lack of parental attachment and autism, and att­rib­uted childhood autism to unemotional, cold mothering. Bettel­heim’s famous theory of autism enjoyed considerable attention and infl­uen­ce while Bett­el­heim was alive.

Bettelheim's life was an example of the very pro­cess he described, the shocking effects of in­humane treat­ment on psychological hea­lth. He suffered from depression late in life, espec­ially after his wife's death in 1984. In 1987 he suffered a stroke. In 1990, he suicided in Silver Spring MD.

Post-death, some of Bettelheim's work was discredited. Controversy arose surrounding Bettelheim's psychological theories AND his per­sonality. He was known for exploding in anger at students or patients, and that he spanked his patients, des­p­ite publicly rejecting spank­ing as brut­al.

Some Freudian analysts followed Bet­t­elheim's lead and created their own methodologies reg­arding autism. Some ac­cused the mother for the child's autism, and others claim­ed that vict­ims were to be blamed for their own bad luck. When I did 2nd year Psychology at university in 1967, I read and loved all the Bettel­heim books pub­lished before 1966. So now that his theories are often dis­fav­oured, I feel retrospectively cheated. Presumably he wasn't 100% brilliant.

The Uses of Enchantment: Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
1976

Still, Bettelheim remains widely known for his stud­ies with autistic and emotionally dis­turbed children and made sig­nificant cont­ributions to their treatment. Orthogenic Sch­ool became a model for applying psycho­an­alytic prin­ciples in the treatment of emotionally disturbed child­ren

Saving Tasmania's aboriginals: Truganini

Truganini in shell necklace, 1866 - jpg

in The Australian

Truganini (1812-76) was born on Bruny Island Tasmania near the mouth of the Derwent River, in her tribal territory. Truganini was a daughter of the leader of the Bruny Island peoples, Mangerner. She grew in her people’s traditional culture, even though Aboriginal life had been disrupted by the British colonists arriving in 1803 in Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania.

Sir George Arthur, the Lt Gov of Tasmania, arranged a plan to deal with the growing conflict between European settlers and Tasmanian Aboriginals. In 1824, Sir George made it a crime to resist British colonisation! He told soldiers and police to raid Aboriginal camps and take them as prisoners; bounties were paid for each capture. Thus Aboriginals were considered as the colony’s open enemies. As the fighting and resistance continued, Arthur suspended ordinary law and declared martial law. The Black Line Military Campaign removed to 200 aboriginals to Flinders Island in 1830 and the Black War was a period of violent conflict (1824-32) between British colonists and Aboriginals in Tasmania.

The tribes were devastated by European sealers, whalers & timber men. When her family met missionaries at Bruny Is in Mar 1829, the soldiers killed her mother and uncle, her sister was taken by sealers and her fiancé was killed by timber men. Only Truganini and her father survived. This Black War conflict saw the near annihilation of Tasmania’s indigenous population which was reduced from c5,000 to c100 people. And it caused immense grief for the survivor Truganini.

The black war
blackwartasmania

 

Yet she laboured to unify what was left of Tasmania’s indigenous communities, working with British authorities to protect other survivors of The Black War. In 1830 George Augustus Robinson, a Christian missionary and Protector of Aboriginals (sic), was hired to move the other 99 surviving people and to settle them on Flinders Island. Robinson might have had his own financial gains but Truganini hoped to resettle and protect the Aboriginals from further violence. Unfortunately the forced resettlement, and the unsanitary state people lived in, proved fatal. The last indigenous people died due to hunger and disease.

She married Woorraddy at Bruny Is Mission. They worked with all the missions that Robinson and his sons conducted inTasmania in 1830-5; the couple acted as instructors & guides in their languages and customs, which were recorded by Robinson in his journal. This was the best surviving ethnographic record of Tasmanian Aboriginal society.

The clash of 2 disparate cultures and the resistance and survival of indigenous Tasmanians was shameful, but Truganini was the faithful companion of Robinson, and assisted in bringing in her friends because she wanted to save them from the British killers.

Truganini, Woorraddy and others from Robinson's mission arrived at the Flinders Island settlement in Nov 1835. With some captured Aborigines still alive, they were to be Christianised, Europeanised and taught to be farmers. She was given a British name by Robinson, but held to her traditional ways. In March 1836 the couple returned to Tasmania to search for the one surviving N.W family, but failed. By July 1837 when they returned to Flinders Is, many had died there and Robinson's programme had failed. Even the island houses built for survivors were not finished. The grim life at Flinders Is was tragic for her.

In Feb 1839, with Woorraddy and 14 others, she accompanied Robinson to Port Phillip. She and 4 others later joined a party of whalers near Portland Bay. where a similar settlement was attempted with mainland nations, again with failure. In 1841 all 5 Aborigines were accused of murdering 2 whalers and in Jan 1842, the men were hanged. Having learnt from the Tasmanian experience, Truganini joined with the Port Phillip people when they resisted Robinson’s plans but she was captured and sent back to Flinders Island. Sadly her husband Woorraddy died en route.

In 1847, Truganini travelled to Oyster Cove with the other Aborigines where they tried to resume their earlier lifestyle. She lived with the Aborigine Alphonso until Oct 1847 when, with dozens of others, she moved to Oyster Cove in her traditional land. She resumed much of her earlier lifestyle, diving for shellfish, visiting Bruny Island and hunting in the nearby bush.

                                    

Residents at Oyster Cove, 1858

National Portrait Gallery

Within 25 years, almost all of the people taken to Oyster Cove had died such that she and William Lanney were the only fullbloods alive. The mutilation of Lanney's dead body in March led Truganini to grieve, for William and for herself.

In 1874 she moved to Hobart with the Dandridge family. She died in their Macquarie St house in 1876 aged 64 with no known descendants, and was buried at the old female penitentiary at Cascades Female Factory. Even in death there was no peace. Her body was exhumed in Dec 1878 by the Royal Society of Tasmania, authorised by the government to take her skeleton on condition that it be not exposed to public view. It had to be decently deposited in a secure resting place accessible by special permission to scientific men for scientific purposes. Yet her skeleton was placed on public display in the Tasmanian Museum from 1904-47.

In 1976, a century after Truganini died, the Tasmanian community wanted her remains be cremated and scattered in the Derwent River. This was a moving occasion that helped Tasmanians recognise the ongoing existence, rights and cultural responsibilities of native peoples.

Tasmania and its islands

Flinders and Bruny Islands marked in yellow

Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus (Allen & Unwin, 2020) is excellent. But be warned; white Australians will feel mortified after reading about their great great grandparents' behaviour.

Stefan Weintraub's top German jazz band!

Austrian artist Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954) painted in 1927, capturing the rough energy of a music that was taking Berlin’s nightlife by storm in the interwar era.

Max Oppenheimer, Weintraub's Syncopators, 1927. 

Jewish Museum Berlin

Used to illustrate brochures advertising Stefan Weintraub's (1897–1981) concerts in late 1920s, it showed the group as a quartet, though they often performed with 5+ musicians. Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff, the founding duo, starred on the drums and saxophone respectively; and they were equally as talented on the piano or clarinet. Weintraub’s band stood out for their range of skills, both in their instruments and the genres of music they performed.

They played symphonic jazz, swing, waltz and schlager, catchy German-language pop songs, wittier than contemporary equivalents. Their biggest hits included My Sweetheart Wants to Take Me Sailing on Sunday and My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo. Berlin’s most creative cabaret composer, Friedrich Hollaender, joined the band in the 1920s and replaced Weintraub on the piano.

They also performed with Josephine Baker and the Tiller Girls Dance Group, and unsurprisingly the Syncopators provided the musical strains to the defining song of the Weimar Republic’s cultural flourishing eg Marlene Dietrich’s Falling in Love Again (1930). Even better was when the band accompanied Marlene Dietrich’ cabaret songs in the famous film The Blue Angel (1930).

Marlene Dietrich and her favourite jazz band

Inside Story

See several other exiles who were brought about by the rise of Fascism, behind the Oppenheimer portrait of the band. The artist himself left Berlin in 1931, emigrating to Switzerland then US. The painting’s owner, prominent lawyer Hugo Staub, fled the city in March 1933, the artwork remaining in his Kurfürstendamm flat.

The rise of Nazism slowed the Syncopators’ booming career. Though the Nazis dismissed jazz as degenerate Negro music, for a few years the band continued to play Berlin venues under the name Die Weintraubs. However after seeing the Reichstag Fire in Feb 1933, the band decided to embark on an international tour (and never returned). Weintraubs Syncopators were never officially banned, but since the man whose name they bore and most of their members were Jewish, their future was doomed (Dümling).

These international musical celebrities of the 1930s left on a 4-year journey across Europe and Russia, in exile from the German Third Reich’s antisemitism. After successes in the Far East and Japan, they moved to Australia. This band of mainly Jewish musicians arrived in Sydney in 1937. The decision of some of them to stay brought them into conflict with the aggressively protectionist Musicians’ Union of Australia. The Union’s wish was to spread available work among a maximum number of Australian musicians, particularly in the difficult Depression-shadowed years of the 1930s. In a similar way, the counterpoint of nationalities within the group was a source of concern to the Australian authorities and grief to the musicians once war began.

Weintraubs Syncopators rehearsing

Weimar Berlin

When war came the men were forced to come to terms with a change in their status, from jazz celebs to enemy aliens. Accused of spying activities in Russia, they were interned, ending the band. In 1941 German, Polish and Chilean national members in its lineup were interned as Enemy Aliens. As Dümling discovered in the National Archives of Australia, a British officer had betrayed them as Soviet spies; for lack of proof for the allegations either way, the Syncopators were locked behind razor wire. Only after the war could most of the band’s members stay in Sydney but drifted apart, working as mechanics etc. Weiberg never played music professionally again. Read Albrecht Dümling The Vanished Musicians to see what happened to the other musos in Australia.

What happened to the art in WW2 and in the post-war years was unclear, but in 1962 the work was auctioned to an ex-Berlin property developer living in Canada, Hugo Staub. For 50 years it adorned his family homes in Montreal & Ottawa, then loaned to Canada’s National Gallery, The painting was sold with the permission of Staub’s descendants who received an ex gratia payment from the sale. The individuals linked together by Oppenheimer’s painting attended its unveiling in Berlin’s Jewish Museum in 2024, giving a sense of completion. To see the band return to the city they left behind, a day after the Reichstag fire, was essential.

Summary They could play 7 instruments each, and critics hailed them as the best jazz combo in 1920s Berlin; Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker were keen to secure them as their backing band. But after the Nazi takeover, and frustrating years of exile and internment in Australia, the legacy of Weintraub’s Syncopators was lost.

 A 100 years after opening, the Weimar republic’s best jazz band returned from Canada to the city that had once adored them, not in real life but on canvas. Now it is on permanent public display in Berlin’s Jewish Museum where the public can see the men safely return to the city they had left behind, after the Reichstag fire. Many thanks to Philip Oltermann who wrote Celebrated again: Portrait of German Jazz-age Pioneers Lost.

Read Silences and Secrets, Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators, 2013, by Kay Dreyfus

Lowestoft soft-paste porcelain: 1756-1801.

Map of Lowestoft in Suffolk,

facing Amsterdam across the North Sea.

A few years ago I asked my students to select an article on Lowestoft porcelain and they thought Antiques Trade Gazette to be particularly helpful.

Clay was found on the Gunton Hall Estate near Lowestoft in Suffolk in 1756, leading to a partnership of local men that established the first Lowestoft porcelain company, then known as Walker & Co. Records show that their distinctive blue and white hand-painted porcelain was highly successful, even though the East Anglian fishing port (see map) was far away from the oth­er centres of C18th porcelain production like London, Staf­f­ordshire or Liverpool.

The ceramic body was made from soft paste, using local clay and bone ash. Clearly the founders aimed to produce useful rather than purely orn­amental wares for local consumption: tea bowls and saucers, small cream boats, mugs, jugs, tea pots and pickle leaves. At first the de­coration was only in under glaze blue; it consisted, like other early English factories, of Chinese-inspired painted landscapes or simple floral motifs. Lowestoft soon added inscribed legends in blue then, from the 1770s, in poly­chrome enamels.

Lowestoft flask, c1780
14cm tall high
from the Geoffrey Godden collection,
sold for £24,000 at Bonhams

By the 1780s one of the factory's specialities was producing special commissions made to com­memorate a special birth or marriage; the pieces were inscribed with the recipient's name and event date. And occasionally there would be a view of a local land­mark. This meant that while Lowestoft porcelain was often unmarked, an unusually high proportion of the pieces were documentary. The Lowestoft busin­ess plan worked; the factory turned out tableware and a handful of small animals for 40+ years! It closed in 1801.

Despite that long production run, Lowestoft was a small business compared to Worcester, but enough of their porcelain has survived to make it worth collecting. Amongst the best known of the collections are the Russell Colman Collection of the local mustard-making family sold in 1948; the Peter Scully Collection, sold in 2008 at Lowestoft auctioneers Russell Sprake, and the Paul Collection formed between the 1930s and 1950s by a local family which sold at Bonhams in 2010.

At auction the top-priced Lowestoft pieces have been inscribed pieces: birth tablets, named and dated mugs, or the blue and white and polychrome painted mugs and inkwells famously inscribed A Trifle from Lowestoft. If the piece was painted with a rare local view, especially by the painter Thomas Allen, it sold particularly well. In 2010, £24,000/USA$38,000 was paid at Bonhams for a very rare flask from the Godden collection that displayed a local shipbuilding scene (see photo above).

Even more expensive was the £30,000/USA47,000 paid at Russell Sprake in 2011 for a guglet/carafe and basin painted in blue with various scenes around the town and coast (see photo below). The charming simplicity and functionality of this set was later added to by artist Robert Allen. His images of St Margaret's Church, the harbour and the town's roads gave great local appeal.

Lowestoft guglet and basin 1764-5,
23cm high
sold for £30,000 at Russell Sprak
This was a world record price for a piece of Lowestoft porcelain at the time.

Readers can examine a special birth tablet that Bonhams in London auctioned in May 2011. It was a circular shape with a raised rim. On one side was inscribed 'SS 1789' Samuel, son of Samuel and Ann Spurgeon, born Nov 1789. It was flanked by stylised florets, within a leafy floral garland, pierced for suspension. On the reverse side, painted in blue were two pagodas on an island, flanking a tall flowering plant, within a border of cross-hatching and scrollwork. The tablet came from The Paul Collection and had been sold at Sotheby's in Feb 1935. It was later exhibited in the Lowestoft China Bicentenary Exhibition 1957. A separate group of three Lowestoft birth tablets (dated 1790, 1792 and 1794) was sold in Bonhams London in Dec 1996.

tulip painter jug, by C.E Heanan, 1776

sold for : £12,000 at Russell Sprake

Peter Scully Collection

Two other sources of information are the catalogue from the 1957 Lowestoft Bi-centenary Exhibition held at Ipswich Museum, and the book Lowestoft Porcelain by Geoffrey Godden, Antique Collectors' Club, 1985.