The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim
| Autor: | Donald W. Goodwin |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1998 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Journal of Psychotherapy. 52:392-394 |
| ISSN: | 2575-6559 0002-9564 |
| DOI: | 10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1998.52.3.392 |
| Popis: | RICHARD POLLAK: The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim. Simon & Schuster, New York, 478 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-684809 389. Two brothers were playing hide-and-seek in a barn loft. The younger one fell through a chute camouflaged with hay and plunged to his death. Bruno Bettelheim, the world-famous psychoanalyst and specialist in severely disturbed children, said the death was caused by suicide, although he had not been within fifty miles of the event. The coroner and everyone else said it was accidental, and the older brother (the author of this book) visited Bettelheim and protested his off-the-cuff diagnosis. Bettelheim was adamant. The boy had committed suicide because of bad mothering. After Bettelheim committed suicide himself in 1990, the author, a professional journalist, embarked on a daunting adventure. He wanted to learn more about Bettelheim and his practices. In the course of an investigation, he interviewed many hundreds of people and examined as many documents as he could get access to. He has now published a scathing account of Bettelheim, one that will jolt and surprise a great many people, except, of course, those who worked closely with him and were familiar with his practices. "You couldn't believe a word he said," stated a colleague. Toward the end of his life, Bettelheim said that "the philosophy of As IF had taught him that. . . Living by fictions might be a way to make life bearable for someone who so often felt depressed and pessimistic" (p. 411). Bettelheim did experience depressions throughout his life, and his final act of self-destruction with the use of pills, alcohol, and a plastic bag around his head brought his life to an end. The obituaries were glowing with praise. Many people, no doubt, took the loss as a personal loss. There were plenty of reasons for Bettelheim to be depressed and pessimistic. He had served time in two German concentration camps and been released under mysterious circumstances. For more than four decades, Bruno Bettelheim was regarded by a large public as one of the world's important, influential psychotherapists ... a Viennese intellectual who stood as "one of Freud's few genuine heirs of our time." In fact, Bettelheim was a lumber dealer who grandly reinvented himself with a fake set of academic credentials after emigrating to the United States. Deception followed deception. Bettelheim claimed that he had traveled in Freud's circle (untrue), had treated autistic children in Vienna (untrue), had interviewed fifteen thousand fellow prisoners for his study of concentration camp behavior (untrue). He was not a nice man. He faked his data; he plagiarized from other books for his three best sellers. He made claims that could not be substantiated, and he was cruel, verbally and physically. He blamed the Jews for walking into the gas chambers, kowtowing to Hitler. He blamed mothers for almost everything. He particularly blamed them for autism. He came to hate his own mother, although they had had a fairly warm relationship when he was growing up. And then there was spanking. Nobody was more vocal about spanking than Bruno Bettelheim. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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