BRUNO BETTELHEIM Back That Are, Perhaps, More Plausible Explanations
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B RUNO B ETTELHEIM R(1903–1990) PAUL MARCUS RUNO BETTELHEIM WAS born in Vienna to upper- sonal style, and, at times, his intellectual outlook, as B middle-class assimilated Jewish parents, Pauline shown by his insensitive and judgmental remarks about and Anton Bettelheim, on 28 August 1903. Though Anne Frank and Jewish group behavior during the Hol- born when the Hapsburgs still ruled the Austro-Hun- ocaust. However, Bettelheim’s incarceration was also garian empire, Bettelheim grew up during the age of a source of tremendous creativity and moral insight. Freud. By age fourteen he was already voraciously One of his first articles, “Individual and Mass Behavior reading in psychoanalysis, an angle of vision that was in Extreme Situations,” which was based on his experi- to inform his later writings on survivorship and the ences in Dachau and Buchenwald, received interna- Holocaust. Bettelheim received his doctoral degree in tional attention and praise. As a traumatized survivor, philosophy and psychology from the University of Vi- Bettelheim’s writing to some extent emanated from his enna in 1938. Soon after, he was incarcerated for ap- need to “work through” his own camp experiences. proximately one year, as a Jewish political prisoner in Bettelheim’s incarceration was in part the basis for two punishment-oriented concentration camps, Da- his new concept of treatment of severely troubled chil- chau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim was released in dren and adolescents at the Orthogenic School, that is, 1939 thanks to the intervention of Gov. Herbert Leh- milieu therapy. Milieu therapy includes using the en- man of New York and Eleanor Roosevelt. tire staff, at all times, for therapeuticinteractionsthat are part of the child’s overall treatment, rather than restricting treatment to a few isolated hours with an individual therapist. According to Bettelheim’s friend Life After the Holocaust and colleague, Rudolf Ekstein, the Orthogenic School was a concentration camp in reverse. In a concentration Bettelheim was married twice. His first marriage, to camp, the inmates, the observers, and the persecutors Gina Alstadt, ended in divorce. His married his second could enter, but for the inmates there was no escape. wife, Gertrud Weinfed, also from Vienna, prior to At the Orthogenic School, the door was closed to outsi- coming to the United States. She died in 1984 and ders such as curious intruders and parents, but it was Bettelheim was deeply saddened over her death. They always open to the children on the inside. Although had three children Eric, Naomi, and Ruth. this allowed the children to run away, most of the time After his liberation from the camps, Bettelheim they would return. (Ekstein, 1991, p. 1080). Moreover, eventually joined the faculty of the University of Chi- at the Orthogenic School the children ate from china cago, where he taught until he retired in 1973. It was plates and lived in a home that was attractive and com- in 1944, on the grounds of the University of Chicago, fortable by any standards for institutions. The children that Bettelheim became the director of the Sonia also had easy access to a cupboard that was always Shankman Orthogenic School, which, under his direc- stocked with candies and snacks tion, became a world renown center for the treatment of In 1990, at the age of 86, Bettelheim killed himself disturbed children and adolescents, especially autistic by asphyxiation while living in a retirement home. This children. event was shocking to the public, and in the popular Unquestionably, like most survivors, Bettelheim press it was often interpreted as a sign of Bettelheim’s was traumatized by his incarceration, which left its personal weakness and mental illness; however, negative imprint on his personal life, his gruff interper- Bettelheim’s suicide followed a series of personal set- 1 BRUNO BETTELHEIM back that are, perhaps, more plausible explanations. subverted, if not totally eliminated. Moreover, when His wife, Gertrude, died in 1984; he had suffered individuals lose their ability to make decisions, their strokes, illnesses, and declining strength that prevented personal integration is also greatly diminished; Per- him from living a productive and meaningful intellec- sonal integration refers to the sense that the different tual life; he had strained relations with one of his three parts of oneself are combined, organized, and working children; and he had sought treatment for a recent bout together as a complex whole. It is this potentially de- of depression. Bettelheim’s decision to kill himself structive tendency in mass society and its negative im- was entirely in syncwith those corevalues that ani- pact on autonomy and integration that Bettelheim tries mated his notion of survivorship, such as his emphasis to illuminate. on personal autonomy and self-respect, especially in Bettelheim suggests that there is a fundamental pro- an extreme situation such as his experience in the con- gression between the depersonalizing effect of techno- centration camp. It seems Bettelheim’s horizon of logical mass society (that is, impersonal bureaucracy, meaning, his capacity for love and work, had dried up, the trend-setting media, and intrusive surveillance); the and this may have led to his decision to commit sui- total mass state, such as Nazi Germany; and, most im- cide. In this context, Bettelheim’s suicide is the ulti- portantly, the concentration camps. Bettelheim saw mate affirmation of his belief that both inside and out- that if the dehumanizing tendency in mass society is side the concentration camp, personal autonomy and not contained, it could evolve into a total mass state self-respect as manifested by one’s capacity to create and live a meaningful life, are to be valued more than that is capable of using concentration camps to crush mere physical survival. It is not by chance that the individual’s autonomy and integration. This devel- Bettelheim was always more interested in how concen- opment Bettelheim calls the “concentration camp soci- tration camp inmates “remained human” against all ety” (Frend’s Vienna and Other Essays, New York: odds, than in how they physically survived. The latter, Knopf, 1990, p. 232). Bettelheim points out that the he thought, depended on the Nazis and was more a main purpose of the concentration camps reached far matter of luck than anything else. beyond their being a place where the SS took revenge on its enemies or made them slaves: “The concentra- tion camp was the Gestapo’s laboratory for subjecting free men, but especially the most ardent foes of the Maintaining Autonomy in the Nazi system, to the process of disintegration from their position as autonomous individuals” (Surviving and Concentration Camp and the Mass Other Essays, New York: Knopf, 1979, pp. 82–83). Society Thus, he thought concentration camps (as opposed to death camps, were never his focus in his theory) should Bettelheim’s provocative and controversial theory of be studied by anyone concerned with comprehending behavior in the concentration camp is widely regarded what happens to a population when it is subject to the as one of the most influential narratives to date on methods of the Nazi system of power. this topic. As Christian Fleck and Albert Mu¨ller have For this reason Bettelheim says that if people under- written, Bettelheim “undoubtedly numbers among the stand what happens to the individual in the concentra- most important and influential analysts of the Nazi tion camp, how autonomy and integration are de- concentration camps.” His work on the camps has “the stroyed, then they may acquire a better grasp of “both status of a ‘classic text.’ ” (Fleck and Muller, pp. ¨ an oppressive mass society, and what it takes to remain 28–29). However, before examining Bettelheim’s ex- autonomous in any mass society” (The Informed traordinary contribution to the understanding of the psychology of the camp inmate, readers need to put Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Glencoe, I16: The this work in the wider cultural perspective that was Free Press, 1960, p. 107). always his main focus. Critics of Bettelheim have frequently forgotten that Throughout his writings, Bettelheim has been con- for Bettelheim, the concentration camp was an extreme cerned with how the mass society has a tendency to version of the dangers embedded in the modern mass undermine people’s struggle to maintain a sense of society, the latter being what was always his main in- autonomy and integration. By the term mass society, terest. That is, Bettelheim wanted to know what were Bettelheim means the highly organized, bureaucra- the necessary inner developments, the higher personal- tized, technological society in which individuals’ ca- ity integration as he called it, that individuals required pacities to make decisions (that is, to be autonomous) as a counterpoint to progress, to the growing complex- about matters that are of deep concern to them are ity of social and technological development. 2 BRUNO BETTELHEIM Psychology of the Concentration Camp ical function of passionately felt and flexibly applied consistent values and moral convictions and a strong, Inmate transcendent belief system. Bettelheim noted, as have Primo Levi, Jean Ame´ry and Elie Wiesel, that “It is a In light of the Nazi aim of breaking the inmates’ auton- well-known fact of the concentration camps that those omy and integration, Bettelheim’s (and by extension who had a strong religious and moral conviction man- most other inmates’) main goal in the concentration aged life there much better than the rest. Deeply camp was “to survive in ways that would protect my religious persons often helped others, and some volun- physical and moral existence,” that is, “retaining [my] tarily sacrificed themselves—many more of them than humanity” (The Informed Heart, pp. 13, 156). Else- of the average prisoners” (Surviving and Other Essays, where, he explains that his main worry besides being p.