Bruno Bettelheim: a brilliant psychologist?

Bruno Bettelheim 

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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