Bettelheim: Living and Dying
Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 8 Editor Jon Mills
Editorial Advisory Board Neil Altman Howard Bacal Alan Bass John Beebe Martin Bergmann Christopher Bollas Mark Bracher Marcia Cavell Nancy J. Chodorow Walter A. Davis Peter Dews Muriel Dimen Michael Eigen Irene Fast Bruce Fink Peter Fonagy Leo Goldberger James Grotstein Keith Haartman
Associate Editors Roger Frie Gerald J. Gargiulo
Otto F. Kernberg Robert Langs Joseph Lichtenberg Nancy McWilliams Jean Baker Miller Thomas Ogden Owen Renik Joseph Reppen William J. Richardson Peter L. Rudnytsky Martin A. Schulman David Livingstone Smith Donnel Stern Frank Summers M. Guy Thompson Wilfried Ver Eecke Robert S. Wallerstein Otto Weininger Brent Willock Robert Maxwell Young
Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies (CPS) is an international scholarly book series devoted to all aspects of psychoanalytic inquiry in theoretical, philosophical, applied, and clinical psychoanalysis. Its aims are broadly academic, interdisciplinary, and pluralistic, emphasizing secularism and tolerance across the psychoanalytic domain. CPS aims to promote open and inclusive dialogue among the humanities and the social-behavioral sciences including such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, religion, cultural studies, sociology, feminism, gender studies, political thought, moral psychology, art, drama, and film, biography, law, economics, biology, and cognitive-neuroscience.
Bettelheim: Living and Dying
David James Fisher
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Cover image: Gustav Klimt, “Tod und Leben”, ©Leopold Museum, Vienna Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2380-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands
TO MY CHILDREN
Ben and Chloe
Contents Foreword
ix
One
Introduction
1
Two
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul
15
Three
Towards A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Fascism and Anti-Semitism: Perceptions from the 1940’s
31
Four
On Parenting and Playing
49
Five
The Relationship and Debates between Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein
57
Six
In Memoriam: Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005)
119
Seven
A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim
127
Eight
The Suicide of a Survivor: Some Intimate Perceptions of Bettelheim’s Suicide
145
Nine
Homage to Bettelheim
155
Ten
An Open Letter to Newsweek
159
Eleven Concerning Bruno Bettelheim: A Reply to Former Patients from the Orthogenic School
161
Twelve Two Letters from Bettelheim to the Author
165
About the Author
167
References
169
Index
175
Acknowledgements
181
Foreword David James Fisher is that unusual breed of psychoanalyst who is also a historian, cultural theorist, and learned intellectual. In Bettelheim: Living and Dying, he provides a synoptic yet exacting account of the life and work of Bruno Bettelheim. Having known Bettelheim personally, Fisher has an absolute gift for illuminating the perplexities, character traits, and internal conflicts of a man both revered and vilified, and like a good novelist, draws the reader in with absorbing clarity. In analyzing Bettelheim’s contributions and controversies, he offers novel and intimate observations on Bettelheim’s personal struggles and anguish. Of special interest is how Bettelheim mentioned the possibility of suicide to Dr. Fisher the last time they met before he took his own life. Here Fisher provides a very humanistic portrayal of a brilliant iconoclast with all the character flaws and creative energies that define his place in psychoanalytic history. Fisher treats his subject matter with sensitive yet brutal honesty, examining Bettelheim’s paradoxical contradictions in professional and personal demeanor, private agonies, life at the Orthogenic School, his friendship with Rudolf Ekstein, his ambivalence about his Jewishness, and guilt and shame over surviving two Nazi encampments during the Holocaust. What emerges is a holistic appraisal of a troubled genius whom was at once an intellectual celebrity, maverick clinician, and traumatized depressive who had a divided self. This book is a significant contribution to the field and is bound to be one of the leading psychobiographies on Bettelheim that has ever been written.
Jon Mills Editor Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies
One
Introduction
Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it. Freud to Arnold Zweig 31 May 1936
Seventeen years have now passed since the death by suicide in 1990 of Bruno Bettelheim at age 86. For the most part it has been a shattering period for his reputation, despite the appearance of no fewer than three major biographies1 and a spate of memoirs and studies assessing his life and impact.2 Bettelheim began publishing in 1943; the last thirty years of his life, he had occupied a privileged position in American letters, commanding a wide audience for his opinions and perspectives, unlike most other contemporary psychoanalysts, with the possible exception of Erik Erikson in America and Jacques Lacan in France, and, of course, Freud. He operated as a public intellectual whose writings and pronouncements were eagerly awaited, widely disseminated, and published in distinguished, large circulation magazines and journals, in addition to a prestigious, commercial publishing house. This meant that his ideas and opinions had a huge impact on a large reading audience. Bettelheim took on an astonishing range of topics and seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge and authoritative voice on diverse themes ranging from the psychological effects of the Holocaust and concentration camp experience, to the understanding and treatment of severely disturbed children, the intricacies of child-rearing, the emotional components of life on the Kibbutz, the significance of fairy tales, as well as the proper attitudes and spirit of reading Freud’s texts. Moreover, his ideas were deliberately controversial; the author’s utterances could be abrasive, omnipotent, and intolerant. He wrote and spoke against the currents of established opinion, taking on sacred cows, relishing his ability to unmask moral shams, to undermine shallow or naïve psychological
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
positions, and to provoke his audience to reconsider established pieties. Undisputedly, however, his distinct voice became part of the contemporary discussion, orienting an educated lay public to many of the seminal issues of the day. Along the way, Bettelheim offended many individuals and constituencies. Along the way, he made enemies. Some of this erupted after his suicide. Gradually, a coherent portrait of the man can be drawn, a portrait of a highly flawed individual, an individual of many contradictions with an excess of strengths and weaknesses. He was a creatively depressed man who had vast supplies of vitality, a prodigious appetite for work, an astonishing curiosity, and a unique capacity to focus both on the large picture and on details. His life was dramatically altered by the sudden and ill-prepared for National Socialist seizure of power in Austria and by his incarceration in two Nazi concentration camps for eleven months in 1938-1939. Before the camps Bettelheim had been a rather typical member of the assimilated Jewish upper middle classes of Vienna, a member of an extremely well educated bourgeois social class, which was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, secular, modernist in sensibility, and progressive in politics. He had earned a doctorate in aesthetics from the University of Vienna. He was highly cultivated and had broad cultural, artistic, and political knowledge and interests. His earliest rebelliousness took the form of membership in the Socialist Youth movement (Wangervogel), where as an adolescent he expressed anti-war sentiments during the First World War, vague socialist principles, a questioning of parental and institutional authority, a preoccupation with sexuality and how it trenched on aspects of the personality, and above all, a fundamental fascination about forms of subjective experience. From his early childhood into adulthood, Bettelheim suffered from bouts of depression, severe problems of self-doubt about his looks (believing that he was ugly), wavering self-regard about his intelligence and his writing skills, ambivalence about his Jewishness, and ultimately an uncertainty about finding a deeper meaning to his life. Bettelheim was a man of quintessential paradox: he could be irritable, unpleasant, rude, angry, impatient, harsh, judgmental, intrusive, critical and raging; at other times he was exquisitively sensitive, kind, caring, courteous, attuned, and aware of the delicate vulnerability of other individuals. In his public persona he could be charming, funny, witty, entertaining, self-deprecating, dramatic, even self-disclosing to those around him. In his private persona, and particularly in the last years of his life when I came to know him, he could relentlessly honest, tactless in his candor, self-lacerating and cruel toward others, and chronically suicidal. His father’s death made him the patriarch of his family at age twentythree, forcing him to take over the lumber business he despised, interrupting both his educational pursuits and his wishes to become trained as a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis became for Bettelheim an integral part of his quest for meaning in life. Even in the worst of existential situations, he insisted on the
Introduction
3
explanatory value of the analytic instrument, its use in elucidating the self’s relationship to itself and to the environment. Psychoanalysis assisted him in his life-long search for autonomy, wholeness, and authenticity. Through psychoanalysis, he learned to be useful to others, to employ his intuitive abilities and his brilliant mind, his easy access to the unconscious, toward the compassionate understanding of other fragile human beings, without degrading or demeaning them. His version of psychoanalysis underscored the humanistic capacity of the individual to engage in conflict to achieve genuineness, to overcome self-deception, to confront dark and often humiliating feelings about the self, ultimately to embrace a full and realistic sense of self-mastery and responsibility about oneself and one’s place in the world. Above all, Bettelheim understood that the paths to self-liberation and self clarification were through the emotions. Before affect attunement and the empathic-introspective method became slogans of the contemporary psychoanalytic movement, he knew from lived experience that emotional expressiveness was the most genuine form of self-exploration and psychological honesty. Though well-versed in classical Freudian theory and a life-long student of Freud’s work, Bettelheim tended to distrust theoretical and abstract approaches to the mind; too much theory resulted in the creation of an estranging distance, diminishing the vital interpersonal link between analyst and patient that was at the heart of the analytic inquiry. The soul - a term he preferred to the mind - was better approached through the creation and sustaining of a safe, trusting, respectful, warm, caring, but not too close relationship between the therapist and patient. This was his model of the ideal psychoanalytic situation, the establishment of an island of serenity between the patient and therapist where dialogue, self-discovery, and affective exploration could occur unimpeded. Bettelheim learned about psychoanalysis in Vienna during the later years of World War I and throughout the twenties and thirties; he moved in social circles that included classically trained analysts such as Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Otto Fenichel, Grete Bibring, and he was the cousin of the analyst, Edith Buxbaum. He entered analysis with Richard Sterba sometime in 1936-1937, largely because of marital difficulties with Gina Weinmann (whom he had married in 1930) and dissatisfaction with his work as head of the family’s lumber company. It is now abundantly clear that Bettelheim never received formal psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society or anywhere else. When I asked Bettelheim about his training in Vienna, he replied: “I don’t really have any memories of this Society, but rather of those who attended it…I got reports of what happened…I had just started the training analysis before the Nazis marched in…As I told you my training was interrupted very early at the beginning by the invasion of Austria by Hitler.” When I asked about how many seminars he had attended, he answered candidly that he had not attended any of them, “No, I had just started.” 3
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
In brief, Bettelheim’s credentials as a psychoanalyst were largely self-created. He became an analyst through a process of self-authorization. He learned about psychoanalysis through his analysis with Richard Sterba, through studying and contemplating the clinical literature, and largely from his work with disturbed patients, drawing on his exceptional capacities to listen, to feel himself into the inner world and intense struggles of others. Above all, it was his patients who taught and supervised him. He made the notion that “the patient is always right” into an irreducible principle of therapeutic technique, making empathic understanding and care for the other the foundation of his clinical style, a style closer to an art than a science. In his selection of candidates to be counselors at the Orthogenic School, Bettelheim tended to care less about academic credentials than about a sincere motivation to learn and work with the children and an ability to access their own emotions; lacking the legitimacy and credentials of one who had graduated from a psychoanalytic institute, he preferred amateurs who were emotionally responsive and intellectually curious to well-schooled mental health professionals, who may have lacked sensitivity and insight into the inner world of the child. Many psychoanalytic pioneers of Bettelheim’s generation received their analytic imprimatur from either an analysis with Freud or one of his leading disciples; many went on to become distinguished contributors to the field as well as outstanding clinicians. Historically, we need to remember that psychoanalysis was a new discipline where formal training was not the only pathway to a successful or distinguished career. To be sure, the absence of formal psychoanalytic training and the absence of a medical pedigree made Bettelheim a target of suspicion and a life-long outsider to the American psychoanalytic mainstream, which was opposed to lay analysis and unwelcoming toward innovators, tending to view these individuals as rebels, or worse still, as “wild analysts.” Bettelheim the public intellectual has occupied a somewhat special terrain in American cultural life. Though he was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, he eschewed research or publication in narrow areas of academic specialization. He contested disciplinary boundaries. He tried never to be scholastic or to write erudite but narrowly focused monographs. Instead he wrote controversial, best-selling, and at times prize winning books that reached a non-specialized public. He had a knack for taking on issues that really mattered to his audience. As he wrote to me of his intentions in writing Freud and Man’s Soul, “what pleased me was that I got so many spontaneous reactions from a wide variety of intellectuals who wrote me that for the first time Freud made sense to them. They ranged from a Nobel Prize winner in economics to the greatest living mathematician, to high-school juniors. This gladdens me, because this is the group I tried to reach.”4 Not surprisingly, his writings have aroused the criticism of specialists and resentment of academic scholars, who questioned his methodology and his tendency to generalize, who enjoyed unearthing factual errors, and who envied his intellectual reach,
Introduction
5
confidence, and authority. Most recently, he has been accused of scholarly deception and plagiarism.5 The public intellectual, likewise, was alienated from the American psychoanalytic establishment. He presented a coherent and often subversive Freudian psychoanalytic perspective while operating outside of and in opposition to organized mainstream psychoanalysis in America; he never taught courses or seminars at psychoanalytic institutes (though he did occasionally offer a course at the extension division of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute), and rarely published in psychoanalytic journals. His seminal books were often ignored or reviewed dismissively by mainstream analytic periodicals. Progression in his career or self-esteem owed nothing to official psychoanalysis; he became celebrated for being an articulate critic of the insiders. As a famous outsider, Bettelheim’s writings were omitted or severely criticized by the psychoanalytic establishment, leaving him feeling both contemptuous and hurt, longing for their recognition, yet hardened to their harsh repudiation of him. Analysts, for their part, may have considered Bettelheim too much a renegade, too free and too iconoclastic to ever be accepted as a card-carrying member of the guild; many must have regarded him as too independent and free thinking, unwilling to abide by the clinical, ethical, and institutional guidelines of the American Psychoanalytic Association. As he wrote to me about his book on Freud, “I did not expect to make a dent among the psychoanalysts…” He wanted to preserve and make relevant a Freudian point of view in order to stimulate reflection and to evoke emotional resonances on the part of his audience. He had no wish to function as a custodian of orthodoxy or someone who protected a naïve but idealized view of Freud. He contrasted ironically his own role to that of Anna Freud, the founder’s daughter, who performed “the role of guardian of psychoanalysis. In regard to her the official psychoanalytic attitude is that everybody has ambivalence about his parents, with the one exception of Anna Freud.”6 As a maverick who spoke with both a human and abrasive voice, Bettelheim preferred to function as a psychoanalytic gadfly, someone who cajoled others to examine their received opinions, who demystified pieties, and who punctured dogma and shibboleths. He was extremely skeptical of psychoanalytic theories that emphasized adaptation rather than conflict, social adjustment rather than ideas more anchored to the creative, playful, and unique, spontaneous aliveness of individuals living in alienating, mass societies. Mass cultures engendered conformity, mindless materialism, and consumption, while penalizing independence of the mind and authentic expressions of the heart; they profoundly endangered the individual’s healthy sense of self and of vitality. Unlike most members of official psychoanalysis, Bettelheim consciously chose to write in a direct, accessible, readable, emotionally laden prose form without recourse to scientific or to unnecessarily erudite language.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
Those who taught and wrote in jargon were trafficking in a language familiar only to a select elite of analysts functioning, according to Bettelheim, as a sect or secret society of initiates, speaking a private and arcane discourse. In effect, Freudian psychoanalysis was too important to be left to the custodianship of the Freudians. It became his mission to broaden the clinical scope of analytic theory and practice to include the treatment of primitively disordered children and adolescents, including autistics, and other diagnostic groups who were considered incurable or impossible to treat by conventional analytic assessments. Simultaneously, he would demonstrate the intellectual and emotional power of the method to reveal how Freud’s project applied to education, parenting, the deciphering of cultural artifacts, the reading of texts, and the decoding of films and works of art. Bettelheim the clinician, then, also became someone who illustrated how psychoanalysis could be used to provide humanistic insights into various forms of cultural life. In this he became an heir to Freud, particularly to Freud’s late cultural writings, to Freud the cultural historian and cultural critic. Likewise, in his writings on the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps, he wrote with the moral authority, gravity, and credibility of someone who had been an inmate in Dachau and Buchenwald, that is, someone who wrote from his own observations and lived experience. His earliest and most influential essay on the concentration camps was summarily rejected for publication by psychoanalytic journals on the clearly preposterous grounds that they were hateful toward the Germans, full of paranoid ideation, and that his article did not provide verifiable data. Bettelheim was angered and depressed by these rejections. Yet he could often take positions that were insensitive and cruel to Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, particularly his insistence on Jewish complicity, psychologically and ideologically, with their own mass slaughter. Bettelheim sometimes engaged in a discourse of blaming the victim. He did not seem consciously aware of his extreme ambivalence toward his Jewishness, as reflected in his ruminations about the dangers of ghetto-style thinking. Bettelheim did not always make historically significant distinctions in his writings on the camps; he failed to differentiate detention and work camps from death camps; he tended to blur specific periods of Nazi terror; he often romanticized the futile acts of resistance on the part of Jewish inmates. His writings on the concentration camps, then, often aroused violent polemics and emotional accusations against him. Although he took the tough position of not needing to be loved and not needing to be popular, these attacks hurt him, and impinged upon older sources of pain, trauma, and the torment of being rejected. Bettelheim had a strong emotional need to be understood. This was one of the reasons for his tendency to repeat himself in his writings. He was wounded when he was misunderstood, wounded in the face of misrecognition. As he mentioned in his interview with me, he despaired of transmitting the fragmenting experience of life in the concentration camps to generations who
Introduction
7
did not live through the Holocaust. They might never have the proper frame of reference, the historical context, for life at an extreme limit of existence. It’s an experience that is so overwhelming, so full of contradictions really that it’s very hard to cope with. I think that anybody who spent time in a German concentration camp - it does not necessarily have to be extermination camp - never gets rid of the feeling of guilt and shame. It is such a degrading experience that you feel obliged not to suffer it, but to fight back your guilt. You have to suppress your normal reactions in a life threatening situation. The problem is that you feel no one really understands what you went through. Some people repress it, some try to go on with life as usual as if nothing had ever happened. That’s a very empty way to deal with it.7
The center piece of Bettelheim’s professional career was his twentynine years (1944 to 1973) as director of the Sonia Shenkman Orthogenic School, affiliated with the University of Chicago. Here too, the portrait of Bettelheim is quite mixed; he brought his personal paradoxes into his various roles and responsibilities as the School’s head. The Orthogenic School was designed to construct a safe, pleasant, comfortable environment for severely disturbed children in a residential center. It would be a therapeutic ambience and a school for the children, while serving simultaneously as a training center for the counselors. In one of the earliest, most rigorous, ambitious, and experimental approaches to the creation of a total therapeutic milieu for the sick child, Bettelheim was operating once again as a forerunner, functioning outside of existing paradigms. He tended to accept children into the school who were unwanted elsewhere, or who were diagnosed by mental health professionals and parents as extremely pathological, anti-social, delinquent, violent, suicidal, autistic, and who had multiple difficulties in forming stable relationships with other children and adults. Bettelheim had hoped to create a milieu which functioned for the well-being and growth of the child. He would use psychoanalytic concepts in this residential setting. Every behavior, feeling, fantasy was to be seen from the child’s point of view; every action and thought had unconscious meanings that required understanding from the perspective of the child. Empathy, intuition, and clinical knowledge were tools to grasp the suffering and anguish of the child. In short, Bettelheim hoped that his School and therapeutic method would constitute a bridge between the world of “insanity” and the world of reason. As head of the Orthogenic School, Bettelheim brought all of his talents and all of his personality idiosyncrasies to the task at hand. The School allowed him to be a healer and a teacher, a researcher and writer, a mentor, supervisor, and therapist to members of his staff, an indefatigable administrator who oversaw any detail of the School’s operation. It has now become apparent that Bettelheim exaggerated some of the clinical results and
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
presented too optimistic a picture of his successes, particularly with the autistic patients, where his results were partial at best. He did this mainly in a series of books that provided case studies and extended explanations about the School’s structure, organization, and clinical orientation. Bettelheim could be incredibly encouraging and kind to counselors, generous with his time, supportive of their personal and clinical maturation. Yet, he blurred many boundaries with his staff, generating confusion and rivalries. He tended to take some of his counselors into analytic therapy with him; he clearly had favorites. This exacerbated resentments within the School, increasing competitiveness and paranoia within the hothouse atmosphere of the School, fostering both idealizations and envy. Bettelheim ran the School first as a teacher and administrator who desired to apply his clinical and pedagogical knowledge; he evolved into an autocrat with no ambiguity about his own power and authority. As he grew older, crankier and more famous, he functioned with a demeanor of arrogance, aggressiveness, and harshness toward staff and children; he became someone who needed always to be right, who went indiscreetly to the point, who jumped to conclusions, who could make both counselors and children feel intruded upon, hurt and humiliated. He could be verbally abusive and hostile; he justified his actions in the name of keeping order in a closed environment where chaos and violence could spontaneously erupt. Borrowing from Freud’s structural model, he conceptualized his role at the School as that of the superego, with the children being the id and the counselors the ego. Dr. B., as he was called, was formidable and the object of interminable rumor, gossip, and transferential fantasy. Like the super-ego, he was a source of moral authority and mastery over anti-social impulses; he could be harsh, punitive, and cruel. Though he radiated charisma, energy, magnetism, and talent, Bettelheim could also behave in an irascible, unpredictable, sadistic, and intimidating fashion. Although he never admitted to it in print, Bettelheim had recourse to slapping and hitting students in order to restore order in situations of crisis at the School. To be sure, his use of corporal punishment has damaged his posthumous reputation, generating a demonology that he was abusive toward patients. He could also behave toward the children in a charming, sensitive, compassionate, and kind manner. He did not permit much personal intimacy, discouraged mutuality, and did not have a natural ease or love for children, as do many child analysts. Without having lived or worked at the Orthogenic School, one can only imagine the transference and counter-transference dynamics unleashed there. As a remarkable and inspiring man at the head, as someone who functioned as a guru in a small, self-contained, pressure-packed institution, Bettelheim was intensely admired and had passionate supporters and disciples; his acts of unkindness, his loss of control, would produce resentment and rage against him by former counselors and students after his death. It will take more time to sort out the nature of the projections and counter-projections of the former patients and counselors as well as how Bettelheim’s anxieties and
Introduction
9
unresolved feelings about himself, particularly his depressive affects, his sense of fraudulence, and his easily injured narcissism, played out in the running of the School. Above all, his books presented an idealized image of the School. Yet, moving beyond those accounts that either glorify or denounce the School, beyond idealization and devaluation, the Orthogenic School must be seen historically and critically as an audacious and imaginative experiment in residential treatment. It yielded intriguing data about such environments and very sick children living away from their parents. It produced a number of remarkable and durable successes. Many graduates of the School claim that Bettelheim saved their lives. Many went on to live rich and productive lives. In his recent memoir, Stephen Eliot presented the most detailed and moving account of his stay at the Orthogenic School. He remembers Bettelheim with mixed emotions, but mostly with affection and gratitude. “He was not only my greatest teacher, which I could acknowledge, but also a friend, although it has taken almost forty years to see it. Like other geniuses, he was complex, mercurial, and not always appreciated.”8 My book of essays on Bettelheim is organized into five overlapping sections: an overview of his life and the impact of his work; an analysis of his texts on the Holocaust and on parenting; a section on his relationship and debates with Rudolf Ekstein; multiple perspectives on his death and suicide; and a polemical concluding section in which I answer a number of vicious and debunking attacks on Bettelheim after his death. The second essay of the volume, “Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul,” provides an interpretation of the critical insights of Bettelheim’s life and work, seen as an integral whole, paying close attention to his writings on the concentration camps. It argues that his history as an inmate of the camps and émigré to America, in addition to aspects of his personality, came together in the creation of his clinical methodology and his search for meaning in dealing with very troubled children. The essay offers a detailed discussion of Freud and Man’s Soul. This evocative text, ostensibly an analysis of the mistranslations of Freud into English, actually became the platform for Bettelheim to articulate his own synthetic view of psychoanalysis as a means to translate into consciousness the individual’s most prized possession, his affective subjectivity; psychoanalytic forms of deciphering, then, enable the exploration of the various dimensions of the soul, a non-religious term used to designate the most significant facets of the individual’s inner world, his being, his source of aliveness and distinctness. Chapter Three compares and contrasts Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic and social understanding of fascism and anti-Semitism, particularly with reference to texts of the 1940’s, to the writings of a cohort of four other analysts, Erik H. Erikson, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel, and Rudolf Loewenstein. All of these analysts were forced to leave Central and Western Europe because of the rise of National Socialism; all suffered from the policies of racial anti-Semitism. I argue that there is a dialectic in these works between an unrelenting moral and political anti-fascism and a marked ambivalence in
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
these authors about their own identities as Jews. Both psychoanalytic theory and an understanding of personality dynamics allowed them to develop penetrating insights into fascist rhetoric, an understanding of the psychodynamics of the fascist and anti-Semitic personality and its defensive strategies, but not into their own confused identities as cosmopolitan Jews and intellectuals, persecuted for beliefs and associations that they no longer shared. The chapter “On Parenting and Playing” is a critical analysis of Bettelheim’s A Good Enough Parent of 1987, his most synthetic work on the complexities of contemporary parenting. Here the Winnicottian Bettelheim reverses course, allowing himself to be less harsh toward mothers and permitting his empathic attunement to be offered both to the inner world of the child and to the wrenching dilemmas of parents. The book is also a sustained argument in favor of playfulness. Chapter Five provides the historical, cultural, and clinical context for the relationship between Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005). Both were Viennese born and trained intellectuals who received doctorates in the human sciences from the University of Vienna in 1937. Both were deeply identified with lay analysis, emphasizing that for psychoanalysis to perpetuate itself it needed to promote serious and rigorous forms of research. Because Bettelheim is the better known of the two, I focus on Ekstein’s family history, with special emphasis on his experience of loss and trauma and his capacity to recover from personal and educational obstacles. I argue that Ekstein was a representative product of Austro-Marxism in the period between the wars, embracing the ethical brand of democratic socialism and group solidarity that was integral to the theory and practice of Austrian Social Democracy. I discuss Ekstein’s training with Moritz Schlick in philosophy and his immersion in the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. From Schlick, Ekstein evolved into a philosophical thinker who learned how to think his own thoughts. Ekstein joined the circle of psychoanalytic pedagogues who clustered around the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, under the tutelage of Willi Hoffer, August Aichhorn, and above all, Anna Freud. The clinical component of psychoanalysis emanated from his commitment to understanding the inner world of the child. Bettelheim and Ekstein first became aware of each other from reading the analytic literature and finally met in America in the 1950’s. They shared a professional interest in conducting research and doing clinical work on severely disturbed children and adolescents, including those with psychotic, borderline, and autistic diagnoses. They debated the value of milieu therapy versus psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy on such children. As their relationship evolved, the two collaborated and began a fascinating correspondence that gradually evolved into an intimate friendship. They both engaged in a polemic with Bernard Rimland, who was massively critical of their clinical work and a hostile opponent of psychoanalytic approaches to the treatment of disturbed children. Rimland advocated a neurological approach to mental illness, with an emphasis on biology and psychopharmacology.
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11
The twenty-two letters that constitute the Bettelheim-Ekstein exchange began with clinical concerns, including the varieties of solitude, isolation, and countertransference disruptions that may trouble the psychoanalytic researcher and clinician in dealing with primitively disordered children. It moves to other issues, including mutual support during the Rimland Affair. As the two became friendlier, a pattern of good-natured competition and envy appeared. The two engaged in a heated exchange on the question of whether contemporary Vienna remained as anti-Semitic as it had been in their respective youths: Bettelheim, the concentration camp survivor, argued that nothing had changed and that most Austrians were viscerally antiSemitic; Ekstein, the Austo-Marxist, contended that one could not blame a generation born after World War II, holding that in his experience many Austrians had examined their consciences and held distinctly different opinions than their parents or grandparents. Toward the end of their correspondence, we encounter Ekstein’s tender sensitivity into Bettelheim’s decent into depression as a result of the death of his wife, Trude, leading eventually to recurrent episodes of suicidal ideation and plans for his own suicide. The letters testify to a unique friendship with a somewhat old-world quality. Chapter Six is an obituary I wrote after the death of my training analyst, Rudolf Ekstein. In it I reconstruct from a distance of over fifteen years the most impacting and enduring emotional aspects of that relationship, including the actions, words, attitudes, and spirit that he imparted to me in the ten-year period that I was his analysand. As part of my work of grieving, the memorial to Ekstein also addresses a number of issues raised by Bettelheim’s life and work: the importance of furthering research in psychoanalytic forms of inquiry, the often heroic history of lay analysis both in Europe and in America, the role of the analyst as an analyzing instrument, and the healing function of kindness and decency rather than the flashing insights and brilliant interpretations offered in the course of a long character analysis. This personal piece of writing attempts to capture and bring alive the relational aspects of our dialogue and in that way to continue the discussion. In Chapter Seven, Bettelheim speaks in his own voice. I call it “A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim.” Here I tried to provide him with a safe and intimate arena to share his most pressing concerns at the very end of his life, including his poignant remarks about suicide. In this interview, I took up with Bettelheim historical questions about his formal psychoanalytic training, his views of other figures in the analytic movement, his thoughts on age, infirmity, illness, the death of his wife, the break with his daughter, and the ubiquitous sense of uselessness he felt as his health deteriorated and he was unable to work. In “The Suicide of a Survivor,” I mourn and try to come to terms with Bettelheim’s suicide by placing the event into the context of his life during his last years, years when I knew him in Los Angeles and when he confided in me. I relate his suicide to the unbearable legacy of shame and guilt after surviving in two concentration camps. The ninth chapter, “Homage
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
to Bettelheim,” is a memorial written shortly after his death in 1990, part of my own work of mourning, my own need to make sense of his violent departure, even though we had discussed this issue previously. The last section concludes on a polemical note, providing some insight into the climate of Bettelheim-bashing and the reactivity of those such as myself who aggressively offered a counter-attack that immediately followed his suicide. It opens with “An Open Letter to Newsweek,” (cosigned by Rudolf Ekstein), where I reply to the factual and interpretive distortions of the piece they called “Beno Brutalheim.”9 Newsweek, by the way, only published an abbreviated version of this letter, omitting any mention of factual errors or sloppy reporting on their part.10 The second piece, a letter published in Society,11 which had printed my interview with Bettelheim, replies to two of Bettelheim’s former patients from the Orthogenic School, who waited until after his death to offer their scathing denunciation of him.12 The volume concludes with two unpublished letters from Bettelheim to me from the early 1980’s. One deals with his reactions to an essay of mine on Civilization and its Discontents,13 and briefly condenses his hermeneutic approach to major texts. The other deals with his own Freud essay and my review of Freud and Man’s Soul.14 They reveal Bettelheim as a witty, razoredged, intellectual, highly opinionated yet courteous, responsive, and respectful toward those engaged in serious intellectual endeavors.
Notes 1.
2.
3.
4. 5.
6. 7.
Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (New York, 1996); Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 1997); Theron Raines, Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 2002). Letters to the Chicago Reader, April 6, May 4, May 25, June 8, July 6, July13, 1990; Charles Pekow, “The Other Doctor Bettelheim,” Washington Post, August 26, 1990; Ronald Angres, “Who, Really, was Bruno Bettelheim?” Commentary, Vol. 90, No. 4 (October, 1990), p. 26; Paul Roazen, “The Rise and Fall of Bruno Bettelheim,” Psychohistory Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring, 1992), pp. 221-250; Edward Dolnick, Madness on the Couch (New York, 1998), pp. 180-184, 210217. For an eloquent defense of Bettelheim, see Elio Frattaroli, Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain (New York, 2001), pp. 132-148. David James Fisher, “A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim,” in Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition ( New Brunswick, 1991), pp. 168170. Letter, Bruno Bettelheim to David James Fisher, June 24, 1983. Alan Dundes, “Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment and Abuses of Scholarship,” Journal of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 104 (Winter, 1991), pp. 74-83. Letter, Bruno Bettelheim to David James Fisher, June 24, 1983. Bettelheim, “A Final Interview with Bruno Bettelheim,” op. cit., p. 163.
Introduction 8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13.
14.
13
Stephen Eliot, Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School ( New York, 2002), p. 5. Nina Darnton, “‘Beno Brutalheim,’” Newsweek, September 10, 1990, pp. 59-60. David James Fisher and Rudolf Ekstein, “Bettelheim Battle,” Newsweek, October 8, 1990, p.11. David James Fisher, “Concerning Bruno Bettelheim,” Society, Vol. 28, No. 5, July/August 1991, pp. 8-9; for the text of the interview, see David James Fisher, “Last Thoughts on Therapy,” Society, Vol. 28, No. 3, March/April 1991, ibid., pp. 61-69. Charles Pekow, “Concerning Bruno Bettelheim,” Society, Vol. 28, No. 5, July/ August 1991, p. 6; Alida M. Jatich, “Concerning Bruno Bettelheim,” ibid., pp. 6-8. David James Fisher, “Reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents,” in Dominick La Capra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives ( Ithaca, 1982), pp. 251-279. David James Fisher, “Review of Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 4, June, 1983, pp. 20-26.
Two
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul
I should like to hand [analysis] over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests. Freud to Oskar Pflister 25 November 1928
Bruno Bettelheim belongs to the finest tradition of European and psychoanalytic cultural criticism. Whether he is explaining the group dynamics of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps,1 unmasking the sentimental popular appeal of the Anne Frank diary,2 satirically undermining Philip Roth’s spoof of psychoanalysis in Portnoy’s Complaint,3 distinguishing between survival and resistance in dealing with the literature and films of the Holocaust,4 or deciphering the unconscious roots of fairy tales, Bettelheim has been at the cutting edge of critical discourse for the past forty years. His works stimulate and irritate. Even his redundancies shake us from our complacency. He does not take the consensus viewpoint. His creativity requires that he be the outsider, taking well-timed shots at various establishments, piercing the conformist or sentimental point of view. His writings invariably challenge the readers’ received ideas. Bettelheim’s audience is invited to reply, to get angry, to enter into dialogue with him, to see, as it were, if his tone of authority is based on substance, or if it simply expresses an authoritarian personality. Bettelheim lived a long and eventful life, producing a substantial and evocative body of work, seventeen books in all, not to mention a prodigious number of articles, prefaces, book reviews, and journalism. For over thirty years, he taught at the University of Chicago, directed the Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed children, supervised mental health professionals, and carried on a psychotherapeutic practice.5 After his semi-retirement in 1973, Bettelheim wrote an additional seven books, including some of his best, and continued to teach, lecture, and supervise. I view Bettelheim as if he took the impassioned argument of Freud’s 1926 The Question of Lay Analysis as his life’s mission. Because he occupied
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a privileged position among contemporary lay analysts, and because Bettelheim’s name is practically synonymous with lay analysis, I intend to extrapolate a few thoughts from Freud’s text to assess what he achieved as a psychoanalytic cultural critic. In outlining the qualities most appropriate to the practice of psychoanalysis, Freud insisted that “doctors have no historical claim to the sole possession of analysis.” With particular opposition to the American scene and the emerging trend toward the medicalization of psychoanalysis, Freud spoke plainly: “We do not consider it at all desirable for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medicine.” Instead, the recruitment and training of analysts ought to focus on the intrinsic trustworthiness of the individual; on the individual’s capacity to acquire knowledge and understanding of the inner lives of other human beings; and on the individual’s readiness to gain valuable experience in depth psychology through a personal training analysis, through supervised study at a psychoanalytic institute, and through sustained efforts at introspection. Practicing lay analysts are not “any chance collection of riffraff, but people of academic education, doctors of philosophy, educationists.” In order for psychoanalysis to fulfill its own internal developmental possibilities, in order for it to resist bureaucratization and ossification, Freud urged that psychoanalytic training remain open to the non-medical laymen. He emphasized the acquisition of expertise in the fields of the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature. Always attuned to the potential for cross-fertilization of disciplines, Freud proposed that the application of depth psychology to history, philology, education, and literature might be methodologically pertinent in solving fundamental problems in those fields. He also anticipated the creative possibilities of lay analysis in the understanding of normal and emotionally disturbed children, in educating educators, and in informing parents how to bring up children.6 Bettelheim’s achievements are precisely in the areas that Freud mentions. He made major contributions to our understanding of contemporary history, having developed a unique and original perspective on the Nazi Holocaust; he devoted his life to the project of integrating his educational and therapeutic concerns; he dedicated himself to the understanding and treatment of children, all of which stems from his advocacy of the helpless child; he produced a seminal and inspirational book on fairy tales; he developed a nuanced appreciation of language and its use and abuse in all interpretative work. Bettelheim’s work is characterized by an astonishingly broad range of interests, where he applied a variety of perspectives that cut across disciplinary boundaries. If he entered different universes of discourse, he came prepared, bringing with him a distinctly European sensibility and a high level of cultivation and scholarly knowledge. Yet he has also demonstrated a capacity to write both for professionals and for a wide literate audience. His prose is clear and accessible, never convoluted or Germanic. Whenever possible, he
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avoids technical or jargon-ridden terminology. His best writing is simultaneously perspicacious, trenchant, caustic, and playful. He is one of a handful of classically oriented lay analysts who emerged as a public intellectual in America; that is, as a social and cultural critic who influenced a wide audience and who commands attention for the power and originality of his ideas.7 Bettelheim’s books sell; they sometimes win prizes. The Uses of Enchantment, for example, won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. A Good Enough Parent sold 100,000 copies in French translation alone and Bettelheim appeared on French television four times consecutively in prime time, no mean feat for a foreigner, especially one with a German accent. His name, face, and tone became representative of psychoanalysis. Perhaps this became certified by Bettelheim’s role in the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig in which he played himself as a spokesman on psychoanalysis. When he told me of the Woody Allen escapade, he mentioned, with a twinkle in his eyes, that he did the scene in only one take. Bettelheim occupies a marginal status in the history of psychoanalysis; his creativity demanded independence; consequently, he deliberately chose to belong to no single school. He is loyal to the authority of Freud as a critical thinker; he is a Freudian who maintains an irreverent, probing, self-analytical stance, committed to the expansion and revision of psychoanalytic concepts and practice. Like Freud’s, the corpus of Bettelheim’s writings is symphonic and he has rarely departed from the methodological and humanistic underpinnings of Freud’s work. As a Viennese who witnessed the birth and hegemonic victory of ego psychology, Bettelheim never embraced nor was embraced by the leading Austrian and American theoreticians and practitioners of ego psychology, many of whom were his teachers, associates, and friends. He was an exemplary representative of the psychoanalyst as university professor, succeeding in a milieu that has been hostile to psychoanalytic modes of thinking and resistant to analytic applications to research. He spent many of his best years at a great university, where he interacted with outstanding scholars, had access to a first-rate library, and assimilated the cultural life of a distinctly American city, Chicago. Professorial responsibilities allowed him to draw a salary to support his family; he eventually gained tenure, liberating him from the economic and practical pressures of the private psychoanalytic clinician; he had minimal anxiety about referrals, about earning a living, about networking, about receiving credentials from the local institute, or about being recognized and being offered legitimacy by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Instead of therapy or professionalization overwhelming the science, he concentrated on investigating, on thinking, on posing questions, and on passionately engaging with some of the most pressing issues of the day. Bettelheim also resisted the temptation to publish highly technical works aimed at a relatively
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tiny coterie of specialists. He did not academicize his research or his mode of touching his audience. Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic cultural criticism is intentionally communicative and dialogic.8 Bettelheim explicitly fashioned his writing to resonate with the hearts and ultimate concerns of his educated public. His pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement of London.9 He did not play it safe or avoid controversy. He was an outspoken, vehement, and opinionated man, frequently pugnacious and acerbic in style. Like Freud, whom he approached as a master thinker, he could be polemical when an issue of integrity was at stake. Bettelheim was not afraid to oppose and to criticize official establishments, including the Jewish establishment and the conservative, medical, psychoanalytic mainstream; outsider status represented a continuous pattern of critical thinking throughout his life. He represents an old, somewhat vanishing European tradition of the psychoanalyst as a nonconforming and free-thinking intellectual. It should also be said that he has been lambasted by the mainstream in tendentious, ad hominem, and often sneering articles, articles that often psychologize, dismiss, or assassinate his character rather than deal with the content of his ideas.10 The old Bettelheim did not “mellow out” or absorb New Age perspectives; he remained just as contentious and just as incisive as his youthful persona; nor had he become more patient with sloppy, mystified, unrealistic, and slogan-ridden forms of thinking. Bettelheim’s writings on the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps emerged directly from his own experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald where he was imprisoned during the year 1938-39. Theodor Adorno once suggested that after Auschwitz there could be no poetry. Bettelheim approached this atrocity to illustrate that there could be memory and reparation, even after Auschwitz. He addressed the genocidal tendencies of modern civilization by assigning meaning to the historical and existential experience of surviving. His analysis of the greatest crime of the past century enables individuals not to be rendered helpless, not to be silenced, and not to be overwhelmed by what he called “the unfathomable horror of mass death.” Without the historical and psychological understanding that he provided, there would be fewer means of resisting future forms of barbarism. Psychoanalysis in the post-Holocaust world owes a huge debt to Bettelheim; he courageously argued against the banalization of this history, against the cheapening of the Holocaust by sensationalizing it, sentimentalizing it, against diluting it with analogies or comparisons; he opposed the ideological or propagandistic uses of it; like-wise, he spoke persuasively of the dangers of forgetting, emphasizing the creative and therapeutic possibilities of remembering, no matter how shattering. His writings on the Nazis stem from a moral vision: the profound conviction that survivor guilt and anger can become a source of ethical and historical insight,
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul
19
rather than a trauma leading to unending repetition, to patterns of resignation and victimization. His 1943 paper, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” is the most famous and forceful report on the concentration camps in the existing literature. In observing and describing the structure of the camps, Bettelheim clearly indicated the techniques and goals of the Gestapo and related their actions to the prevailing Nazi ideology. The concentration camps were explicitly set up to destroy the morale of the individual prisoner; to spread terror; to provide the Gestapo with a training arena; and to torture, torment, and break the body and spirit of the inmates.11 Although his report is a classic, Bettelheim’s article was rejected summarily by prestigious East Coast psychoanalytic and psychiatric journals; they alleged that the author lacked objectivity in the writing about these issues; that his slant was unfair to the Germans; and that the author, himself, a Jew, psychoanalyst, and social democrat, was suffering from paranoid delusions. It was published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, a journal read primarily by teachers and researchers in social psychology. Almost immediately afterward, the perspicacious left-wing social critic, Dwight Macdonald, appreciated its value as a conceptual breakthrough, reprinting it in his journal, Politics. This opened Bettelheim’s work to an audience of non-professionals, inaugurating a career of cultural criticism.12 Bettelheim realized that the concentration camps represented something entirely new for the victims and the victimized. Along with other members of his generation, like Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell, Bettelheim connected the Holocaust to a critique of totalitarianism. He emphasized the psychological dimensions of this terrifying and sadomasochistic relationship of master and slave. The deepest lesson of the concentration camps was the ways in which modern mass society, with its scientific and technological resources, could extinguish a sense of individuality, and could demolish an individual’s sense of self. The degree of psychic trauma and regression which the prisoner in the camps underwent unveiled the terrible vulnerability of the self in extreme situations, that is, in a setting of physical deprivation and psychological abuse and torture. For the prisoner, the main drama was the struggle to maintain his selfhood intact, to fight off personal disintegration, to keep a moral perspective and to perpetuate a sense of human dignity. Furthermore, the concentration camp experience was not unique. Bettelheim warned that genocidal possibilities existed in all technological societies, leaving contemporary man threatened not only by massive alienation and domination, but also with the loss of his autonomy.13 If Bettelheim’s writings on the Holocaust display the psychoanalyst’s capacity to speak out publicly and to introduce the element of resistance to the passive participation in mass death, his work on children testifies to his unrelenting commitment to resonate sensitively with the lived experience and internal and external struggles of the young. Bettelheim’s clinical philosophy
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
insists that the therapist be warm and spontaneous, and establish an emotional closeness with the child. His interest in children and in infant autism began in Vienna before the experience of fascism, the concentration camps, and exile ruptured it. It resumed after his emigration to the United States, continuing until his death. Many of his conclusions about parenting are summarized in his 1987 book, A Good Enough Parent.14 After surviving the concentration camps, Bettelheim was motivated by his anger about the shameful and pathetic waste of the lives and spirit of emotionally disturbed children. They existed in a confused and anxious state of abysmal misery. Like a prisoner in the camps, an emotionally troubled child remains completely at the mercy of others who believe they know how he should live. Bettelheim’s therapeutic approach refused that notion. The orientation of the Orthogenic School pivoted on the deep empathic understanding of the child, defined as the therapist’s vicarious experience of feeling himself into the mind and the skin of the other. While taking on the treatment of supposedly untreatable and hopeless cases - including schizophrenic, anorexic, antisocial, and autistic youngsters - Bettelheim advocated the sustained personal investment of the therapist in the play, learning, and the inner world of the child.15 His direction of the Orthogenic School anticipated by decades the psychoanalytic understanding of the optimal therapeutic milieu; he stressed the need to respond to the child’s demands for prolonged safety and comfort; he pointed out the necessity for a humane concern with space and living conditions, with the therapist providing a secure, stable residential center. He also designed his training of the personnel to be simultaneously cooperative and therapeutic, but without room for the infantile and grandiose rescue fantasies of the staff.16 Bettelheim’s case studies also directly addressed the issues of the therapist’s countertransference, especially its uses in generating connections and in deepening one’s relationship to the other. These audacious proposals pioneered the addressing of such material in the clinical literature, which previously was considered inappropriate.17 Bettelheim, to be sure, was no stranger to the dark side of man: his aggressivity, his selfishness, greed, death wishes, and death anxiety, his capacity to do and to think evil things. Preoccupied with the exploration of unconscious conflicts, he also recognized that the unconscious was varied, multi-layered, chaotic, ambiguous, and ill-defined. If he directly experienced terror and clinically immersed himself in the horrific life histories of the severely disturbed, the fairy tale text, perhaps Bettelheim’s masterpiece, abounds in the author’s sense of delight and astonishment in the poetic and imaginative inner world of the child. For the child, fairy tales entertain, arouse curiosity, stimulate the imagination, enlighten, clarify emotions, and resonate with their anxieties, depressive states, and conflicted aspirations. They accomplish something that realistic or didactic stories fail to do: namely, to take seriously the drama and enormity of the child’s psychological and developmental dilemmas. They affirm the
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul
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child’s struggle for meaning in his life. Bettelheim invites parents and educators to follow the child’s lead, to let the child determine which fairy tale will be most important at a specific phase of life. The task of the adult is to overcome being alienated from the subjective experience of the child’s world. As the security of the extended family ended, the enormous pressure on the nuclear family increased. Just as the wellintegrated community ceased to function, so a historical situation emerged increasing the contemporary child’s separation anxiety and annihilation anxiety. These anxieties require an appropriate sensitivity on the part of the parents; parents must give up their own self-centeredness in order to respond to the child’s legitimate needs, affirming the child’s sense that his experiences, desires, and fantasies are justified by his psychological situation. The reading aloud of fairy tales not only validates the tender affection of the parent for the child, but it sets in motion a flexible, subjectively rich interpersonal relation. This close, affect-laden interaction between parent and child facilitates the child’s subsequent growth, promoting psychological independence and moral maturity.18 Freud and Man’s Soul (1983), his thirteenth book, focused on another vital area of inquiry in the human and social sciences today: language. More specifically, it addressed the elusive issue of Freud’s language, the content and spirit, the surface structure and significant latencies of Freud’s texts. In this jewel of an essay, Bettelheim restored the concept of the soul to the psychoanalytic corpus. In differentiating the soul from the mental apparatus, he was not referring to a concept which is religious, supernatural, metaphysical, or mystical. The soul was the life principle in man; it represented that part of man’s nature which is spiritual and emotional, the human being’s most prized possession. As a psycho-logical concept, the soul symbolized a deeply hidden seat of the mind and the passions that were hardly accessible to investigation. It was worth investigating in the context of a trusting collaborative psychoanalytic dialogue because all that is precious, worthy, and human in man was influenced by it.19 Bettelheim made a number of pronouncements about psychoanalytic theory and practice in this text. First: what it was not. Psychoanalysis was not about making life easy; it was not about the amelioration of isolated symptoms; it was not about adjustment to the existing social or political status quo; it was not a system of intellectual constructs or abstractions; it was not the sole prerogative of the physician or the medical and biological disciplines; it was not a religion; it was not about the purveying of an esoteric or revealed body of truth; it was not a positivistic or pragmatic form of knowing whose results can be replicated, predicted, or statistically measured.20 For Bettelheim, psychoanalysis was first and foremost a human science of the spirit, part of a tradition of secular hermeneutics, that is, an introspective form of self-understanding that relied on the exploration of unconscious and symbolic meanings. As an ideographic science, psychoanalysis belonged to the human sciences where the method was
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING
historical, archeological, and, above all, interpretative. Psychoanalytic insight threatened our narcissistic image of ourselves; it revealed that the “I” is not the master of its own house, thus injuring our self-love and our self-esteem. Profound self-knowledge always turned on the exploration of the individual’s most shameful, most incestuous, and most destructive internal forces. Above all else, Bettelheim argued that psychoanalysis was part of an endless process where an individual resumed a stunted developmental course, aspiring toward or approximating psychological maturity. Its insights enhanced the capacity of an individual to acquire a moral education, learning how to act and behave ethically. In attempting to wring some meaning out of our existence, psychoanalysis accepted the problematic and tragic nature of life without being defeated and without giving in to escapism.21 Freud’s writings, Bettelheim argued, have been misrepresented by his translators in The Standard Edition. Why did he raise these issues about a distorted translation? The cultural critic cannot disregard these inaccuracies because Freud’s ideas have radically shifted the twentieth-century perception of humanity. Freudian terminology has penetrated into everyday speech. Freud’s words have evolved into a universe of their own; his language has decisively shaped our conception of subjectivity, despite its uncertain destiny. Language was central in understanding Freud’s theoretical orientation; the repercussions of Freud’s words were vast for those engaged in therapeutic endeavors and in humanistic enterprises. Thus, how Freud was translated can largely determine how he was read and how his ideas were applied. The strategy of Bettelheim’s book was to indicate selectively crucial mistranslations of Freud’s work from the German to the English. He was uniquely qualified to perform this task. He entered adulthood in Freud’s Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. His cultural, educational, ethnic, and linguistic background resembles Freud’s (the most important contrast would be the absence of medical and neurophysiological training in Bettelheim’s formation). Bettelheim alerts us to the outright errors, esotericism, and clumsy technical jargon in The Standard Edition. This obstructs the process of making Freud’s words accessible to the reader. The translators failed to engender a sense of the metaphoric implications of psychoanalytic concepts. He emphasized how Freud, an ingenious and inventive writer, rarely borrowed from Latin and Greek usage; rather the major sources of his writings came from ordinary spoken German, as well as from the existing psychological and psychopathological literature of his day. Bettelheim hammers away at several overlapping themes: that Freud sounds more abstract, more scientific, more dispassionate, more mechanistic in English than in German; that the recourse to specialized vocabulary in the English version covers up imprecise, often soft, thinking and deflects the reader from emotional associations; that Freud frequently opted for the most simple word in German without striving for consistent or systematic meaning every time he used a given term; that Freud’s language was explicitly chosen
Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul
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to sound an intimate note, that is, that he built theory in order to strike his audience’s private register. In short, reading Freud ought to invite a process of familiarity, akin to the spontaneous, empathic feelings of closeness experienced in confronting what is human in oneself. Reading Freud ought not to be conducted at too great a distance, ought not to be experienced with the feelings of strangeness or detachment. Freud’s sublime gifts as a writer allow his audience to return to themselves both emotionally and intellectually. The corpus of his work stands as an extended invitation to explore one’s inner depths; it encourages a deeper understanding of one’s unconscious and of the unconscious modalities of others. Although he does not cite his predecessors, Bettelheim’s critique of the faulty translations in The Standard Edition is not new. Lacan, among the most penetrating, railed against erroneous conclusions based on erroneous translation for years.22 In the introduction to the superb The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967), Daniel Lagache called for a more “faithful translation” of Freud’s work.23 English translator James Strachey mentioned the “deficiencies” and the “irremediable” faults of his efforts in the 1966 “General Preface” to The Standard Edition. Strachey was aware of the untranslatable verbal points in Freud’s writings, especially in the autobiographical works like The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. He mentioned that Freud’s German editions were often untrustworthy.24 Moreover, Ernest Jones alerts us to Freud’s “cavalier” attitudes about foreign editions of his writings; Jones, nevertheless, predicted that the English translation would be more accurate than all previous editions.25 At first glance, Bettelheim seems harsh in criticizing the Herculean enterprise of making Freud’s complete psychological works available in English. Perhaps the best that any individual could accomplish would be a sustained structure with a unified thematic. This, it seems to me, Strachey accomplished. Bettelheim would disagree, strenuously. He is attacking a sacred cow by calling into question The Standard Edition, which scholars and the general public have gratefully used since its publication between 1953 and 1974. The extensive annotations, explanations, cross referencing, and its official authorization by the Freud family and the psychoanalytic establishment, have made it a chief source of reference for those seriously committed to studying Freud’s work. Bettelheim irreverently reveals gaps in the translation, glaring errors of fact, and untenable misinterpretations of Freud’s major texts, including the titles of his works. For Bettelheim, The Standard Edition does a disservice to Freud because it distances the reader from his own unconscious conflicts, barring access to his own deepest desires and anxieties. Freud modernized the injunction to know thyself by inviting his audience to confront what is darkest, ugliest, most untamed, most disordered in themselves. Freud’s insights, Bettelheim contends, injure modern human beings’ narcissistic image of themselves as civilized, rational, perfectible, loving, progressive, dutiful, and harmonious. Misleading and incorrect translations subvert Freud’s humanistic
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intentions; consequently, his translators are responsible for a “perversion of the original,” proving, once again, how the translator is a “traitor to the author.”26 Bettelheim explains the betrayal of Freud by his – admittedly – selfchosen translators. When psychoanalysis was presented to English and American audiences, the analytical side was given a privileged position over the psychical side. Psyche, Bettelheim reminds us, means soul, emotion, and the human conceived in an un-scientific sense. To comprehend the psyche, Freud held that one had to know and deal with one’s unconscious strivings, unconscious fantasies, and symbolic representations. This form of knowing required interpretation, a sustained effort to get beneath the surface of things, a suspicion of externals, to restore the psyche to its latent layers of meaning. The Standard Edition distorts the spiritual side of psychoanalysis by overemphasizing analysis, the scientific effort to break down and to dissect the mind. Scientists tend to approach the mental apparatus from the outside, from an apparently objective or detached point of view, thus disregarding the emotional nuances, metaphorical quality, poetic and imagistic contents of the soul. For Bettelheim psychoanalysis unquestionably belongs to the humanistic disciplines, not to the natural sciences. This was Freud’s intention. The determining influence of Goethe on Freud’s intellectual development and methodology can be seen, Bettelheim contends, in the syntheses of his late, cultural texts. Unfortunately, Freud’s translators blunted the emotional impact of what Freud was conveying in order to make the scientific component of his discourse palatable to the “positivistic-pragmatic” branch of clinical study so dominant in England and America, especially in psychiatric milieus. The clarity and definitiveness of Freud’s writings in English camouflage the contradictions and ambiguities of the German original. The Standard Edition obscures the spirit as well as the content of Freud’s ideas by transforming what is essentially a human science (a branch of knowledge much closer to hermeneutical-spiritual knowing) into something that approximates natural science. Bettelheim detects two motives that underlie the mistranslations: the desire to make psychoanalysis acceptable to a medical and psychiatric community in England and America; and the unconscious wish of the translators to detach themselves from the subversive impact of the unconscious. Countering recent efforts to debunk Freud by characterizing him as an unoriginal, anachronistic, nineteenth-century man of science, Bettelheim claims that Freud evolved from a biologist to a theoretician of the soul. For evidential value, he observes that Freud rarely cited scientific or medical literature, while often referring to or paraphrasing literary, artistic, and philosophic works. Freud wanted the psychoanalytic profession to be ideally composed of “secular ministers of souls,”27 that is, something between the physician and the secular priest. There is no doubt that Freud borrowed from and contributed to psychology, but to a form of psychology far removed from the banalities of Anglo-Saxon behaviorism or the gross obviousness of
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academic psychology. He was unconcerned with predictive or readily replicated empirical science. Rather, Freud’s psychology was tied to a hermeneutical branch of philosophy devoted to unraveling the meanings of the deeper, buried, fragmented, and many-layered nature of psychic reality. Bettelheim’s most telling illustration of mistranslation is his exegesis of the concept of soul (in German: die Seele). Freud clearly and distinctly meant soul and not mind or mental apparatus (as The Standard Edition has rendered it). Bettelheim has rehabilitated the concept of soul for the psychoanalytic profession, while affirming a militantly secular and humanist version of this metaphor. He does so without muting Freud’s lifelong atheism and his unwavering distrust of wishful or delusional thinking. The soul ought not to belong exclusively to the universe of discourse of religious thinkers, Jungians, or mystics. By soul, Bettelheim means people’s common humanity, their essence, their most valuable traits, and their spiritual core. Soul cannot be comprehended precisely without collapsing its emotional and vitalistic resonances. Soul cannot be defined or pinned down. The soul is one of those border concepts straddling psychology and language; it is a metaphor that Freud employed self-consciously as a metaphor. It evokes both an intellectual and an affective response. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the supernatural, with a religious deity, with salvation, or with immortality. As a secular discipline, psychoanalysis can legitimately be concerned with spiritual endeavors. The good psychoanalytic researcher investigates the underworld of the soul. If he treats the soul as the human being’s most prized possession, he also knows that the soul requires a care and respect – a love – not to be mistaken with the medical orientation of therapy and cure for the body. Bettelheim contends that Freud never wished psychoanalysis to be a subspecialty of the medical profession. The text he cites most often by Freud is the much neglected The Question of Lay Analysis.28 Bettelheim offers other tasty examples of incorrect English constructions of Freud’s seminal concepts. As an adherent of the structural model, he shows that the English version of id, ego, super-ego radically falsifies Freud’s original German, transforming these living aspects of the soul into cold, reified, teleological, and reductionistic agencies of the mind; this totally blunts the affective impact on the reader. Freud selected personal pronouns to name these concepts; Bettelheim restores the it (for id), I or me (for ego), and above-I (for super-ego); he suggests that the personal pronouns relate directly to the individual’s experiences, thereby arousing his associations, memories, fantasies, and desires. The personal pronouns allow the reader to get inside the psychoanalytic process itself; they allow his I or me to borrow from, coexist with, and achieve rational control over the it. He retranslates the famous line (“Where id was, there ego shall be.”) from Freud’s thirty-first lecture in The New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) as “Where it was, there should become I.” The I, in brief, does not
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unseat, ride, or obliterate the it, but rather the I labors to change itself in significant ways in order to achieve or perpetuate culture.29 There are other semantic rectifications in the Bettelheim volume. “Free association” is not free at all and he urges us to regard the fundamental rule as an idea or image that spontaneously comes to mind. He translates fending off or parrying for “defense,” occupation for “cathexis,” and lapse for “slips of the tongue.” He reveals a double error in the title of the 1914 essay, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” and substitutes “Drives and Their Mutability.” For Civilization and Its Discontents, an inspired title in my judgment, Bettelheim prefers a more literal The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture, a title consistent with the underlying intention of the text to be sure, but unconnected to the artistic underpinnings and imaginative structure of the essay. However, I found it dubious, even a bit illogical, for the translators of the The Standard Edition, James Strachey and Anna Freud, to be held responsible for the positivistic, empiricist, and medical-biological slant of these twenty-four volumes. Historically, both Strachey and Anna Freud were lay analysts, both were analyzed by Freud, and both were deeply trusted by Freud and members of his estate. Ultimately, Bettelheim’s indictment of the translators of The Standard Edition is exaggerated. Perhaps purposefully. From their own published writings, it is clear that Strachey and Anna Freud sought to anchor psychoanalysis in a biological framework based on Freud’s early energy model and instinctual drive theory. It was not bad faith or unconscious motives that made them reject Bettelheim’s version of psychoanalysis as an interpretive science with its own laws and techniques, its own, primarily hermeneutical, sense of exactitude and research strategies. That is, Bettelheim’s Freud is subjectively different from the Freud of Strachey and Anna Freud; different, in that his conception of psychoanalysis is more literary, more historical and archeological in methodology, more enamored of prehistory and mythology, more preoccupied with securing psychoanalysis a place of honor in cultural history, less interested in establishing its scientific verifiability and experimental or clinical validity. For Bettelheim psychoanalysis is more exciting as a general theory of culture, not (as for Anna Freud and Strachey) as a refined instrument of therapy. Bettelheim appreciates the complexity in Freud’s thought by explicating his gifts as a writer: his ability to operate on many levels simultaneously, his deft choice of allusions and references, and his capacity to touch his readers affectively and intellectually. Every translation is a rewriting and a reinterpretation. Certainly, there are critical inaccuracies, pretensions, and linguistic problems in The Standard Edition; often the multiplicity of meaning, inconsistencies, the earthiness, the wit, the Jewish humor, and the poetry of Freud’s writings are not sufficiently fleshed out. If Bettelheim makes errors in emphasis, he compensates for them with his candid and intransigent humanism. He does not tediously lament the
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current crisis or decline of the humanities. Instead, he makes a strong case for psychoanalytic humanism. In the process, he recruits Freud to a pivotal position in the modern humanist tradition, albeit a hermeneutical-spiritual one. Bettelheim’s humanism is oriented toward the dynamic of self-discovery, toward integrating the hidden and narcissistically injurious truths about one’s inner world. His is a demystifying and critical humanism which attempts to lay bare the psychosexual and aggressive roots of human beings’ psyche and behavior. This form of humanism is neither mawkish nor akin to the belief in Santa Claus. Bettelheim firmly understands the determining role of unconscious conflict in symbol formation, inner and outer representations of reality, and in the multiple ways in which individuals deceive themselves. Bettelheim practices a polemical kind of psychoanalytic cultural criticism. He discloses the errors, sophistry, idiocy, dangers, opportunism, and silliness (sometimes all of the above) in his opponent’s views. Bettelheim writes with a strong point of view and he willingly argues it. He is prepared to generalize, to take risks, to give offense, in order to stir up his audience. Despite its negations, I read his Freud and Man’s Soul as essentially an affirmative work. It is ultimately an essay on ethics. It is written in defense of culture, more specifically it depicts how conflict works both to generate and to allow the individual to comprehend cultural creation. Bettelheim sees no end to the individual’s antagonistic relationship to his environment, no end to intrapsychic conflict. He accepts these struggles as part of humanity’s existential curse. Rather than be wished away, struggle ought to be embraced. It is not accidental that the feisty Bettelheim published this essay first in The New Yorker, the weekly that analysands read. It appears he decided tactically to influence the psychoanalytic community by uttering his thoughts through the back door; analysts would hear his irreverent message via the analysand’s words from the couch. There is controlled anger in his writings, a certain glee in standing apart, a pride in pointing out the deficiencies and shallowness of American culture, including American psychoanalytic culture. Bettelheim’s tendency to repeat himself, a characteristic flaw in all of his writings, suggests a frustration at not being listened to, an exasperation at not being understood – the recurring complaint of all polemical writers. Regardless of its weaknesses, its self-righteous and strident tone, Bettelheim wrote a spirited essay, which posits that knowledge of the self and the search for the truth are at the center of the psychoanalytic project. Written from an independent and free thinking position, one which indicates his debt to and identification with Freud, especially the late Freud, Bettelheim did not disguise his animus toward establishment psychoanalysis in America. Psychoanalysis, he emphasized, was never designed to move in the direction of social accommodation or adaptation to the prevailing opinions, conformist values, or anxieties of any civilization. In the midst of the contemporary malaise of psychoanalysis, the essay is an eloquent testimony to the need for humaneness, truthfulness, compassion, and courage on the part of the psychoanalytic researcher and practitioner in pursuit of the buried meanings of
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humanity’s inner life. Bettelheim, finally, enjoins us to return to the soulful letter and spirit of Freud’s writings with the same tragic skepticism of the late Freud. Such a voyage into the realm of humanity’s soul is surely interminable, but Bettelheim, with his dialectical love of process, is undeterred. He would agree with T.S. Eliot in enjoining us to launch and sustain the journey: We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.30
Notes 1. Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations”(1943), in Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 48-83. 2. Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank” (1966), in ibid., pp. 246257 3. Bruno Bettelheim, “Portnoy Psychoanalyzed” (1969), in ibid., pp. 387-398. 4. Bruno Bettelheim, “Surviving” (1976), in ibid., pp. 274-314. 5. For biographical information, see Morris Janowitz, “Bettelheim, Bruno,” in Biographical Supplement to International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1979); Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America (New Haven, 1984), pp. 63-68; Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’s to the Present (New York, 1983), pp. 203, 209-210, 295. For some auto-biographical data, see Bruno Bettelheim, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays (New York, 1990), pp. 24-38, 98-111. 6. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20 (London, 1959), edited by James Strachey. 7. I am borrowing the concept from Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in The Age of Academe (New York, 1987), although Bettelheim is unmentioned the text. 8. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, 1981), translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Tzvetan Todorow, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Diological Principle (Minneapolis, 1984), translated by Wlad Godzich. 9. For a comprehensive bibliography, see David James Fisher, “Bruno Bettelheim’s Achievement,” Free Associations, Vol. 2, Part 2, No. 22, Spring, 1991, pp. 200-201 10. See Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in The Death Camps (New York, 1976), pp. 61-63, 88-94, 182-187, 189-194; for the representative psychoanalytic dismissals, see Stanley J. Coen, “How to Read Freud: A Critique of Recent Freud Scholarship,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 36, no.2, 1988, pp. 487, 489-491; Darius G. Ornston, “Review of Freud and Man’s Soul,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 33, supplement 1985, pp. 189-200. 11. Bruno Bettelheim,“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” in Bettelheim, Surviving, pp. 48-83.
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12. Bruno Bettelheim, “Behavior In Extreme Situations,” Politics, August 1944, vol.1, no.7, pp.199-209. 13. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York, 1960). 14. Bruno Bettelheim, A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-rearing (New York, 1987). 15. Bruno Bettelheim, Truants From Life: The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children (New York, 1955); Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (New York, 1967). 16. Bruno Bettelheim, A Home for the Heart (Chicago, 1974). 17. Bruno Bettelheim, “On Writing Case Histories,” in Bettelheim, Truants From Life, pp. 473-478. 18. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1975); also see Ruth B. Shapiro and Constance L. Katz,” Fairy Tales, Splitting, and Ego Development,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 14, no. 4, October, 1978, pp. 591-602 for a balanced critique. 19. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York, 1983). 20. Ibid., pp. 6-7, 16, 40-41, 43, 53, 107. 21. Ibid., pp. 33, 35, 43, 57, 76-77, 102-103, 109-110. 22. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” (1956), in Lacan, Ecrits (New York, 1977), translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 114-145; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973) (New York, 1978), translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 4446. 23. Daniel Lagache, “Introduction” (1967), in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1973), translated by Donald NicolsonSmith, p.viii. 24. James Strachey, “General Preface” (1966), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (London, 1966), pp. xiiixxii; Strachey dubbed his translation a “blurred reflection” of Freud’s thoughts and words, calling himself a “contriver” see, ibid., p.v. 25. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: the Last Phase 1919-1939 (New York, 1957), pp. 9-10; also see Ernest Jones, Free Associations (New York, 1959), p. 169. 26. Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul, p. 101. 27. Ibid., pp. 35. 28. Ibid., pp. 33-34, 35, 36, 37, 6-61, 71. 29. Ibid., pp. 61-64. 30. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” In T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 19091950 (New York, 1952), p. 145.
Chapter Two appeared in David James Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (1991), pp. 139-155; parts of this essay first appeared in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Spring 1984, pp. 39-42 and Free Associations, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1991, pp. 191-201.
Three
Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Fascism and Anti-Semitism: Perceptions From the 1940’s
The Jewish problem is born of antiSemitism; thus it is anti-Semitism that we must suppress in order to resolve the problem. Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946
The British historian E.H. Carr claimed that all history is contemporary history. No historian can escape from his own relationship to the present; each inevitably sees the past through the perspective, that is, the anxieties and desires of the present. Historians record and evaluate the past refracted both through the pressures of their current circumstances and through the dynamics of their own personality. The goal is to create a dynamic interaction between his material and himself, an honest and respectful dialogue between the facts of history and interpretations, an open-ended conversation between past and present.1 The 110-year history of psychoanalysis presents precisely the same problems that Carr mentions. What is selected and omitted, emphasized or emphasized, argued or refuted will all turn on the historian’s contemporary concerns and how he consciously and unconsciously conceives of the present; nor can the historian’s ideological affiliation, perhaps best conceptualized as theoretical and methodological loyalties, filtered through his personal life, be bracketed out from his approach to the past. Freud left a number of pithy remarks on anti-Semitism and German fascism. When he learned of the Nazi book burnings in May 1933, including the destruction of his own texts, he commented: “What progress we are making! In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.”2 In June 1938, after the invasion of Austria by the National Socialists, the 82-year-old Freud was required to sign a document to secure an exit visa; he asked to add a sentence to the affidavit: “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.”3 Freud speculated that anti-
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Semitism and castration anxiety were integrally connected in unconscious thought processes: “The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off from his penis a piece of his penis, they think and this gives them a right to despise Jews.”4 In Freud’s brief “A comment on anti-Semitism,” 5 written shortly before his death, he expressed his wish for non-Jews to protest against the “anti-Semitism excesses of today.” Disguising his own voice in this piece, Freud distinguished his position from Christian sources and from secular humanists. He proposed to be speaking the “religion of truth,” underscoring the history of centuries of injustice towards and persecution of the Jews. He reminded the reader of certain aspects of Jewish superiority, particularly in the scientific, technological, and cultural realms: “They [the Jews] do not need so much alcohol as we do in order to make life tolerable; crimes of brutality, murder, robbery and sexual violence are great rarities among them; they have always set a high value on intellectual achievement and interests; their family life is more intimate; they take better care of the poor; charity is a sacred duty to them.”6 Although I do not have the space to discuss it here, Freud elaborated his controversial views on the dialectic of anti-Semite and Jew in Moses and Monotheism.7 From Freud we get a spirited but ironic anti-Nazism. He viewed the Nazis as barbaric, denounced their policies and attitudes as representing a regression to outmoded medieval notions, signifying a revival of the old pogrom mentality. There is no sustained theoretical or clinical analysis of anti-Semitism, only an incomplete and abstract conjecture. Freud never elaborated a systematic understanding of the modern potentials for mass extermination in the German and racial versions of anti-Semitism. He did not apply his own theories about collective pathology, the destructive possibilities of modern mass mobilization, and the leadership principle that he had elucidated in Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.8 In effect Freud, who remained in anti-Semitic and fascist Vienna as long as he could in the middle and late 1930’s, did not produce an early or penetrating understanding of the dangers of fascism represented to Western civilization, to democratic forms of government, to humanistic values, even to the future of the psychoanalytic movement. We must turn to the next generation of psychoanalysts, to a younger group more firmly anchored in twentieth-century realities than Freud, predominantly but not exclusively more politicized and left-wing than Freud, more appreciative of the cultural and socio-economic roots of social movements and of nationalistic currents, to understand the earliest psychoanalytic perceptions of fascism and the atrocities of anti-Semitism. This chapter will survey psychoanalytic writings from 1940 to 1950, specifically drawing on articles and books written before, during, and immediately after World War II. I will focus on five European analysts whose lives and orientations were decisively changed by their own experience of
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German fascism. In examining the writings of Otto Fenichel (1897-1946), Ernst Simmel (1883-1947), Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994), Rudolph Loewenstein (1898-1976), and Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990), my study presupposes they all suffered personal distress, trauma, dislocation and persecutions because they were Jewish psychoanalysts and intellectuals, and that fascist anti-Semitism caused them to rupture their lives in Europe, forcing them to emigrate to the United States. In looking at their earliest assessment of fascist racism and the dynamics of prejudice, I will organize my chapter into five categories: (1) awareness of environmental factors; (2) data upon which they base their interpretations; (3) dynamic formulations about antiSemitism; (4) their ambivalence about their own Jewishness; and (5) conclusion. My approach will be comparative and thematic. The key texts to be discussed include two papers by Otto Fenichel; two papers by Ernst Simmel, including one originally published in 1932 Der Sozialistiche Arzt (The Socialist Physician) and the other a lengthy essay on “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology” from Simmel’s 1946 edited volume Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease; several papers by Erik Homburger Erikson written prior to Childhood and Society (1950), including “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” (1942) and four recently published pieces of “war memoranda” written between 1940 and 1945, from A Way of Looking At Things9 (1987); Rudolph M. Loewenstein’s Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study10 (1951); and finally the powerful classic by Bruno Bettelheim on the concentrations camps, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” written between 1940 and 1942, originally published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology thanks to the intervention of its editor Gordon Allport. Allport, past President of the American Psychological Association and Harvard Professor of Psychology, played a significant supportive role in this history in the 1940s; though a “non-analytic” psychologist, he wrote the “Preface” to Simmel’s volume on anti-Semitism; Erikson reports that he served as a member of the Committee on National Morale, along with luminaries like Gregory Bateson, Kurt Lewin, and Margaret Mead, working to coordinate and interpret information on German fascism. Despite its early rejections by psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals, Bettelheim’s essay had the most impact largely because it negated the widespread disbelief in the United States about concentration camps in Nazi Germany, countering the general unwillingness on the part of the American government and population to fathom the reality of Nazi atrocities. His essay was subsequently reprinted in Dwight Macdonald's journal Politics in 1944; by the end of the war, General Dwight Eisenhower required that it be read by the United States military government officers stationed in Germany. To capture the flavor of these earliest psychoanalytic investigations, I will occasionally make reference to Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic text, Escape from Freedom.11
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AWARENESS OF ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS None of these psychoanalytic texts are exclusively psychologizing. Each and every one attempts to integrate environmental factors. Each author viewed fascist anti-Semitism as a social pathology, that is, as an individual and social “disease.” Fenichel’s 1940 paper emphasized the importance of specific historical conjunctures, above all, the political and economic context of Germany, in addition to psychological factors to explain German fascism. Employing the key concepts of a Marxist sociology, widely current in leftwing European circles during the 1920s and 1930s, Fenichel argued that fascist anti-Semitism was an over-determined historical phenomenon, but its key component was authoritarianism and obfuscation of class conflict. AntiSemitism deflected the revolutionary tendencies of the masses away from social rebellion; it blunted all efforts at radical reform into hostility toward the Jews. At the same time anti-Semites maintained an uncritical respect for authority, law and order. Anti-Semitism had to be understood as part of an international class struggle released by the world-wide economic crisis of the depression. It was “a weapon in the class warfare dominating the present era.”12 Fenichel’s second paper on anti-Semitism, written after emigration and his arrival in the United States, deletes the Marxist language of the first one, de-emphasizes social and economic determinants, and gives the psychological and intrapsychic more interpretative weight.13 Ernst Simmel was a medically trained psychoanalyst who co-founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920. From 1927 to 1931 he directed the Schloss Tegel, a psychological clinic and sanatorium in the outskirts of Berlin, designed to apply psychoanalytic principles to the treatment of severe mental disorders, including perversions, addictions, psychoses, and psychosomatic disorders. Simmel was best known for his seminal contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of the war neuroses, or of shell-shock, during World War I.14 He was held in high esteem by Freud and his closest associates and was for a time Freud’s physician. After the Nazis came to power, Simmel left Germany and came to Los Angeles, California, in 1934 to start an institutional center for training clinicians in psychoanalysis, which led to the eventual foundation of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute in 1946. While in Germany, Simmel was a committed, practicing Socialist and was the President of the Association of Socialist Physicians. He spoke the interwar language of German Social Democracy, including direct references to class struggle, to calls for the socialization of the medical system and the healing arts, and explicit support for health insurance. He minced no words in unmasking the dangers for mental health represented by National Socialism; he opposed the brutal policies of Hitler, pointing out their warlike, anti-social, and atavistic tendencies. Through the device of mass suggestion, Hitler denounced his enemies as if they existed outside the community. Simmel
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clearly recognized that fascist exclusionist policies might result in murder. “This time it is the Jew, the Marxist, the dissenter in general he is the target, in reality the phantom for taking off steam from the aggressive cannibalistic drives.”15 It is not surprising that Erikson, whose pre-psychoanalytic origins were as an artist and pedagogue, would highlight cultural determinants in his analysis of German national character. The liberal Loewenstein built his argument about anti-Semitism by insisting on a dialectical relationship between Christian and Jews and by demonstrating the historical roots of antiJewish sentiment in Christianity; while privileging the psychological component, his analysis also focused on the xenophobic, economic, religious, and cultural foundations of anti-Semitism. Bettelheim structured his argument by highlighting different reactions to the extreme traumatic situation of the concentration camp experience in terms of social class. The Freudo-Marxist Fromm framed his discussion of the “Psychology of Nazism” by insisting that Nazism was primarily an economic and political problem and by connecting the emotional appeal of the Nazi ideology to its socio-economic roots. DATA Fenichel built his psychoanalytic theory of fascism around a non-specific summary of anti-Semitic literature; he did not cite his primary sources and he quoted Freud and Theodor Reik from the secondary literature. Simmel’s data derived primarily from the history of anti-Semitism, particularly the accusations against and denunciations of Jews; he referred to LeBon and Freud and the literature on group psychology, but conspicuously omitted references to Wilhelm Reich’s classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism of 1933.16 Erikson performed a textual analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, examined several of Hitler’s speeches, and also had access to interviews with German prisoners of war. Loewenstein, known subsequently as the master clinician in the triumvirate of ego psychologists with Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris, drew on his own clinical work with anti-Semitic patients he had analyzed in France; he also offered a psychoanalytic reading of typical samples of anti-Jewish literature, such as the Russian document, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Fromm’s basic data emerged from an evaluation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and from Joseph Goebbels’ novel, Michael. Bettelheim’s paper came directly out of his own personal experiences as a survivor of two concentration camps, Dachau and Buchenwald, during the year 1938-1939; he claimed to have sampled other prisoner reactions to the camps by having conversations with an estimated 600 prisoners at Dachau and 900 at Buchenwald. His perceptions of the dynamics of adaptation and disintegration were enhanced by dialogue in the camps with two other prisoners, Dr. Alfred Fischer and Ernest Federn, both professionally trained mental health practitioners.17
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Fenichel’s analysis of anti-Semitic personalities underscored the defensive process of projection, particularly a splitting mechanism of the ego where hostile impulses were disavowed and externalized. He focused on the hidden meaning of anti-Semitic images of the Jews, picturing the latter as “murderer, filthy, and debauched.”18 Since there was no rational or statistical justification for these accusations, he viewed these vilifications as creations of the antiSemitic imagination. The Jew is a projection, a displacement substitute for the homicidal, dirty, and voluptuous tendencies concealed in the Jew-haters. The anti-Semite sees in the Jew what he does not wish to be conscious of in himself, especially whatever is unappealing, such as his own aggressiveness. In the unconscious of the rioters, the Jew symbolizes their own repressed instincts, including images of strangeness, wickedness, and ugliness, which they despise in themselves. Because the Jew is resented and blamed, he readily becomes transformed into an object of reprobation. This is a relatively easy mental maneuver because he is a member of a racial minority and because of his alleged emphatic foreignness. For Fenichel, perceptions of the Jew and the unconscious instinctual drive of hostility have foreignness in common.19 Simmel proposed that anti-Semitism was a mass psychosis, akin to a paranoid form of schizophrenia; he characterized the illness as one which unleashed the instinctual forces of primitive hatred and destructiveness, with the ultimate goal of massacring Jews. Jew-baiting was equivalent to Jewbiting, which psychodynamically stems from archaic tearing and orally devouring tendencies. Anti-Semites were driven by a loss of reality, a break of the ego, and the conversion of illusory ideas into delusions. Anti-Semitism was fueled by the forces of projection and denial, all resulting from a splitting of the ego, particularly prevalent in the mass mind. The collectivity regarded the Jews as the personification of the devil, the symbol of all civilization’s evil, the epitome of degeneration and decadence. The anti-Semitic individual in the group undergoes a severely regressive process, or mass psychosis, marked by a conspicuous loss of judgment and moral values; he reexternalized his super-ego in the image of the leader. “This clinical syndrome: unrestricted aggressive destructiveness under the spell of a delusion, in complete denial of reality, is well known to us as a psychosis. Thus antiSemitism as a mass phenomenon appears to be not a mass neurosis, but a mass psychosis”20 Simmel’s phenomenological description sounded remarkably similar to present-day understandings of extreme borderline pathology. The anti-Semitic group mind, despite reacting to situations with an immature, highly disintegrated ego, served to protect the individual antiSemite from insanity. Anti-Semites do not know they are sick and they do not seek out forms of therapeutic treatment. The gains in their illness are a form of ego inflation, superiority, and the overcoming of alienation through membership in a supposed true spiritual community, like the Volk, the nation, or the Nazi Party. Given the lethal power of its projective mechanisms and its
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insatiable orality, modern mass anti-Semitism could also displace its notion of Jewishness, foreignness, or devilishness onto any absolute enemy. A leader of the mass anti-Semitic mind could arbitrarily decide who a Jew was, condensing his debased image onto a number of international or domestic enemies. Projection was similarly a defensive strategy to expel the horrific enemy within. “The anti-Semitic complex in man can be used over and over by the mind engineers (propagandists) of dictator regimes to serve two ends at the same time: first, to manipulate the ‘crowd mind’ within their country in order to whip up collective national hatred; and second, to disintegrate the collective spirit of the enemy nation.”21 In analyzing the imagery of Hitler’s childhood, Erikson offered a developmental psychoanalytic perspective, influenced by Aichhorn’s study Wayward Youth (1925). Hitler’s personality and world vision flowed from an arrested or, more precisely, a delinquent adolescence. The Fuhrer’s character structure remained that of an unrepentant and intransigent adolescent, one “who never gave in” to the adult world. Having failed artistically, academically, and professionally, Hitler learned to exploit his own failures and those of his parents’ generation. Erikson viewed Hitler’s vision of a Thousand Year Reich as a fantasy of adolescent aggrandizement. As Fuhrer he dealt with the older generation of Germans in a stubborn, devious, cynical manner. Hitler’s hysterical oratorical tirades resonated with the mass audience because they tapped into deep-seated resentments and criminal solutions. Erikson diagnosed Hitler as a severely disturbed personality, but one endowed with resilience and with a capacity to exploit his symptomatology: “He [Hitler] has hazardous borderline traits. But he knows how to approach the borderline, to appear as if he were transgressing it, and to turn back on his breathless audience.”22 The Nazi ideology reflected and elaborated the projections of an adolescent delinquent, hence, the arrogance, defiance, scorn, violence, antisocial goals, and desires for dominance. Hitler’s imagery resonated with a large sector of German society because of the affinity of Hitler’s family experience and upbringing with that of millions of other demoralized Germans. Erikson also attributed part of Hitler’s wide popular appeal to the political immaturity of the German people, to German susceptibility to emotional and histrionic appeals, to a national masochism, and to a paranoid suspiciousness toward democratic modes of governing and thinking.23 For Erikson, Hitler remained a fixated adolescent delinquent, who never overcame conflicts around authority and around conflicting instinctual drives. Nazi ideology was an ill-digested, irrational blend of social ideas, grandiose ideals, and suggestibility of the German populace, generating a hypnotic effect which was morbid and sinister. Erikson saw German antiSemites constructing a simplistic dichotomy of black and white, revealing phobic avoidance and the wish to extirpate everything black. The Germans were receptive to imagery of the Jew as a germ or a foreign body that poisoned, infected, or emasculated the nation. With the Jew described as
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small, black, and hairy, the German Aryan became the positive opposite: tall, erect, light, soldierly, and clean. For Erikson, the German-Jewish antithesis, while it contained an aesthetic and moral dichotomy, essentially reduced into that of the superman and the apeman. He speculated that Hitler’s Jewish phobia may have been a personal symptom that was particularly well suited for exploitation though shrewd use of propaganda. Erikson also noted projection at work in Hitlerian anti-Semitism, particularly the externalization of German weakness.24 Within the framework of his discussion of the history of Christian ambivalence toward Jews, Loewenstein emphasized Oedipal dynamics to explain the persistence of anti-Semitism. In effect, the ancient conflict between Christians and Jews represented the struggle between a younger and older religion, a religion standing for the sons versus one standing for the law and for the dominance of the fathers. Psychodynamically, this conflict reflects the child’s past conflict with his father and “becomes the unconscious symbol of the Oedipus complex.”25 For the anti-Semite, the Jew becomes a scapegoat for his own repressed sadistic and masochistic ideas. The Jew, like the real father imago of the anti-Semite, is hated, loved, and feared. Loewenstein showed how the unresolved Oedipal passions could work to shatter the accepted limits and boundaries of the super-ego. “The concept of the Jew, therefore, was only a superstructure over primitive conflicts deriving from the Oedipus complex. The Jews, therefore, do not necessarily represent the epitome of all evil to all Christians. They can, however, do so under the pressure of pathological factors, individual or social.”26 Hitler attempted to eradicate the superego by delegitimizing all moral values except those of the master race and the Fuhrer.27 Bettelheim, for his part, perceived the existing psychological literature to be conceptually inadequate to grasp the horrific experiences of the concentration camps on its victims. Beginning with when he was being transported to the camps, immediately after receiving a bayonet wound and a heavy blow to the head, Bettelheim approached the border of fragmentation, wondering “all the time whether man can endure so much without committing suicide or going insane.”28 He coined the phrase “extreme situation” to emphasize massive traumatic environments that pushed an individual to an ultimate limit. The camps dehumanized and threatened the personality with disintegration because of the severe and unrelenting traumatic effects of everyday life in such brutal and brutalizing settings. He defined an extreme situation as one marked by the strict monitoring and discipline of the prison guards, characterized by torture, terror, and overwork in mindless and monotonous tasks; prisoners were dressed in improper clothing, suffered from the absence of medical care, and were deliberately mystified by not knowing why they were imprisoned or how long imprisonment might last. This massive anxiety and shattering trauma placed the prisoner in a psychological and existential position of being overpowered, leaving him helpless, passive, and completely subjected to the arbitrary will of the guards. The sadistic Nazi
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system, Bettelheim insisted, had developed methods to transform previously free citizens into serfs. Concentrations camp life severely injured the selfesteem, the sense of self, and the integrity of the inmates.29 Bettelheim detected a number of defensive techniques used by inmates to prevent the total unraveling of their personality, attempts by the individual to preserve some autonomy and to protect against the total disintegration of their minds and value systems. He described a gamut of defenses spanning the spectrum from neurotic to psychotic. He observed detachment on the part of prisoners, a defensive need to inhibit their emotions and to split themselves into subjects and objects. Desperately seeking to preserve their pre-camp images as liberated subjects, many became convinced through derealization that this horrible experience was happening to them as objects, things, not real people. Many prisoners refused to share their thoughts and feelings about the inhuman experience of the camps, expressing banal or distorted emotions instead. Inmates gave vent to their hatred of the S.S. in dreams of revenge against the guards; daydreaming was common.30 The most macabre defense of all, however, resulted from regression to a child-like state. Because the camp experience generated a persistent and shattering form of terror, because the inmates were so dependent and so prone to annihilation anxiety, because the group dynamics were so damaging to the inmates’ self-esteem and so destructive to their sense of self, they became infantilized, gradually losing their former normative systems and ideals as self-determining individuals. Exploring a variation of the defense known as “identification with the aggressor,” Bettelheim spoke of an identification with the torturers, as evidenced by the prisoners imitating the S.S.’s attitudes and styles of behavior. This included Jewish prisoners who inflicted pain on other Jewish prisoners, who imitated the S.S.’s clothing and leisure time activities, to the extent of adopting the S.S.’s racial and conspiratorial theories about Jews. Identification with the torturers operated defensively as a result of massive regression, with the prisoners assuming a child-like attitude toward the S.S. For their part the prison guards became objects of projection, as if they were figures of an all-powerful father surrogate, receptacles of both intense positive and negative transference from the inmates.31 AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THEIR OWN JEWISHNESS Simmel’s volume on anti-Semitism mostly omitted any discussion of Jewish character traits. In his “Introduction,” he suggested that “the question whether unconscious trends in the Jewish personality correspond to unconscious trends in the anti-Semitic personality deserves much more consideration.”32 Fenichel stressed the history of scapegoating Jews in Germany, the Jewish position as persecuted minority, their defenselessness in often hostile environments, their cultural and linguistic differences, their foreignness, and above all, the existence of a “psychology of the Jews” stemming from centuries of ghettoization.33
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I want to signal the middle name in the signature of the author of “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” Erik Homburger Erikson. Erikson’s first seven publications, from 1930 to 1938, were signed Erik Homburger. We now know him as Erik H. Erikson. In the section of his paper called “Jew,” he proposed a number of reasons why Jews became the logical and convenient victims of German anti-Semitism, specifying their availability for an infinite number of projections of badness or blackness. In summarizing centuries of wandering and dispersal, Erikson discussed the survival of “two Jewish types”: the ghetto Jew, that is, a regressive Jewish personality or, in his words, “the Orthodox, not influential, anachronistic type,” unable to adapt to a changing environment or time; and the “successful type,” continually adapting to changes, by either skills in trading goods and cleverness or by attaining leading positions in the arts, sciences, and cultural enterprises. “His talents and his compulsion, his vices and his genius, are all based on a sense of the relativity of values.”34 This stereotyping of the Jews into two simplistic typologies has the ring of the pejorative; it suggests a heightened ambivalence of the author about his own Jewish identity. Erikson asserted that Jewish relativism could easily dissolve into “nihilism,” that psychological insight could be used to devalue the absolutes of the majority and host countries that Jews could not defeat by might. My own speculation is that Erikson’s ambivalence about his own Jewishness, his shame, guilt, and possible hatred of himself as a Jew are being expressed in these passages, just as is his ultimate rejection of Jewishness. The future theoretician of identity had difficulty in acknowledging and identifying with his own Jewish mother and Jewish stepfather, Homburger. Too cosmopolitan and sophisticated to become a ghetto Jew, he could not accept the uncertainties that resulted from “Jewish relativism” in the area of psychological knowledge and ethical values. Erikson would subsequently opt for an ethics grounded in religion, for example, in his attachment to Luther and to certain ideals of Christianity, and subsequently in his adherence to the nonviolent ideology of Gandhi.35 Perhaps Erikson’s need to distance himself from his Jewish cultural roots and origins derived from an unanalyzed negative transference to Anna Freud, his training analyst, and to her circle of overprotective maternal figures in Vienna. It may express an unanalyzed negative transference toward Freud, whose relativity of values and atheism were quite pronounced in his theoretical and methodological repertoire. Ambivalent passages about Jewish geniuses of modernity, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, can also be found in his Childhood and Society.36 Loewenstein’s book cites the previously published articles by Fenichel, Simmel, Bettelheim and Erikson. His concluding chapter to his monograph focuses on “Jewish character traits.” He is clearly identified with Freud’s atheism, scientific aspirations, and secularism; cultures advance when religion plays a less significant role in the life of a given society; religions influence civilizations in predominantly negative ways. Loewenstein was motivated to write this study because of his exclusion from his beloved France
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simply because he was Jewish: “… although born in pre-1914 Russian Poland, I had for many years completely identified myself with France only suddenly to find myself morally rejected by my adopted country because I was a Jew.”37 Claiming to be “objective and impartial,”38 that is to say, scientific, Loewenstein argued that he examined the question of a Jewish character typology neither to vilify nor attack the victims of Nazi anti-Semitism, but to inquire if there was something in the Jewish personality that provokes conflict in the anti-Semite, possibly explaining the “almost universality of the prevalence of hostility toward Jews.”39 Unable to live up to his aims, Loewenstein’s chapter on Jews is denigrating, overly general, and biased against the Jews, almost to the point where the author appears to accept a plethora of anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew. He assumes the existence of a universal Jewish personality. Despite some positive comments about the Jewish aptitude for intellectual endeavors and inclination toward spiritual and ethical concerns, he constructs an unflattering portrait of miserly and spendthrift Jews; of overly anxious and overly protective Jewish mothers; of Jewish horror of physical violence; of Jewish Puritanism, asceticism, and sexual inhibition; of a Jewish pathological reaction to anxiety in many situations; of a high incidence among Orthodox Jews of hypochondriasis and disorders of the digestive system; of Jewish obsequiousness and lack of fighting spirit; of a Jewish desire to placate the allpowerful enemy; of the Jewish recourse to irony as a weapon; of Jewish superiority rooted in narcissistic self-inflation; of Jewish tendencies toward profound, ineradicable self-doubts and a chronic sense of inferiority; of the Jews’ destructive criticism and of their need to prove themselves more intelligent than others. “And if there is anything peculiar to the Jewish mind, it would seem to be the special ways in which the ego deals with aggressive drives and the defense mechanisms the Jews have elaborated in terms of the peculiar circumstances of their social environment.”40 Rejecting the Zionist option after the foundation of an independent State of Israel, Loewenstein foresaw the possible dangers of identification with the aggressor on the part of the Israelis, manifesting itself in extreme nationalism and in hostility toward the Arabs. In effect, Loewenstein presents a group picture of an infantilized, immature, and wounded people, deeply damaged by centuries of anti-Semitic persecution. “The Jews, in spite of their conviction that they are God’s favorite sons, experience the miseries they endure as a lack of affection and, like children, they suffer more from lack of affection, than from actual injustices.”41 Bettelheim also expressed mixed feelings about his Jewishness. In the paper “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,”42 though ostensibly written as “a Jew to fellow Jews,” he articulated the secular Jewish heritage of the Enlightenment and of nineteenth-century liberal humanism, which was founded on a tradition of compassion for others, a sense of moral responsibility, civic and social service, the protection of democratic freedoms and the human rights of individuals. His ties to his Jewish origins consisted of
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a sense of solidarity to “all others who were singularly persecuted.”43 Bettelheim denounced ghetto thinking as a fatal mistake; it was anachronistic, narrow-minded, nationalistic, and self-righteous; it perpetuated a history of Jewish passivity, of refraining from resistance to injustice or revolt from oppression; it functioned as an insensitivity to the debasement of the oppressor; it was based on the defenses of avoidance, denial, delay, and the desire to ingratiate oneself with one’s moral or mortal enemies. Ghetto thinking essentially reflected an inner resignation about life. Because it precluded non-ghetto, that is, secular historical and psychological perspectives, because it was cut-off from twentieth-century realities, such as mass murder and genocide, the ghetto mentality resulted in actions that were innocent, passive, ignorant, and ultimately self-destructive.44 Bettelheim exhorted his post-Holocaust audience to remember that there could be no real peace of mind, no authentic protection, unless they understood how six million Jews died, almost entirely without struggle or resistance. There could be no innocence in the face of mass slaughter. In insisting that Jews need not be helpless nor impotent, Bettelheim emphasized the successful resistance of Jews during the World War II, praising those “Jews who had shaken off an internal ghetto.” There was nothing noble in submitting passively to the sword or to the gas chambers only degradation, only the transformation of a human being into a debased thing.45 Bettelheim, like his other psychoanalytic colleagues, appears to be trafficking in his own form of reductionistic thinking, his own caricature of ghettoized Jews, opposing it to an ideal of the emancipated Jew. He was, to be sure, self-conscious about the double bind of the Jewish survivor, exhorting other Jews to keep alive the possibilities of an active, democratic resistance to Nazism (and other totalitarian threats) through the formation of “independent, mature, and self-reliant persons”46 capable of group opposition and selfdefense against the system. To the end of his life, however, Bettelheim remained an alienated, homeless, enlightened Jewish intellectual, trying to preserve his autonomy. He could neither join allegiance with the ghetto Jews and their descendants, nor participate with Israeli Jews who, at least, had an ideological and practical commitment to fighting back. Bettelheim remained a non-Jewish Jew who was ambivalent about his Jewish identity, describing himself poignantly as a Jew who found himself midstream, “in between, nowhere truly at home. They, like the author, are inwardly torn.”47 CONCLUSION The psychoanalytic writings on fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1940’s reflect the strengths and limitations of the state of the science of that era. Freud’s influence and the European enlightenment heritage are transparent. The key theoretical ideas are grounded in instinctual drive theory, Freud’s structural model, with particular emphasis on super-ego conflicts, splitting of the ego, and the potentiality for the eradication of the super-ego. Several
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thinkers viewed German anti-Semitism as yet another derivative of Oedipal dynamics and they used ego psychological concepts to illustrate and prove their theses. I saw no evidence of the influence of the English object-relations school, no mention of the narcissistic dynamics that might be at work, except as a term of reprobation. Erikson integrated some of the psychoanalytic developmental thinking on delinquent adolescence into his papers. Most of the literature stresses the pathologizing aspects of anti-Semitism, while neglecting the adaptive and skillful uses of propaganda and mass psychology by the fascist leadership. These psychoanalytic thinkers emphasized that the key mechanisms at work in anti-Semitism were splitting, paranoid projections, sadomasochistic forces, and primitive residues of Oedipal dynamics, including identification with the torturers. These psychoanalytic papers reveal the influence of context, especially of the European politics and culture of the 1930s and World War II. These writings belong to the history of anti-fascism, a history that is still being constructed. Fenichel and Simmel wrote markedly different papers on antiSemitism when they were still in Europe than those composed once they emigrated to America; the latter indicates a sign of de-politicization and deradicalization, possibly expressing a wish to play it safe and not be perceived as subversives or threats to their American audience. Marxist socio-economic analysis gave way to psychoanalytic interpretations about prejudice; class analysis was replaced by psychodynamic perspectives on race. From an explicit socialist internationalism in Europe, we see a marked shift away from politics toward peaceful reforms and educational concerns in America. Franklin D. Roosevelt is quoted instead of Marx and the classics of European Marxism.48 All of these thinkers, with the possible exception of Erikson, maintained pessimism about the destructive potential of the individual and the horrendous barbarism inherent in mass psychology. Some of the writings explicitly work toward weakening religious impulses, aiming to humanize Christianity, urging Christians to recognize their history of psychological and cultural suspiciousness, if not hostility toward Jews. Several papers attempt to dilute irrational crowd-mindedness on the part of bigoted groups. These texts were written to educate and influence academics, statesmen, governing elites, and other clinicians, as well as to have some future impact on mothers and on modes of child-rearing. In Erikson’s case, there is solid evidence that he directly influenced the U.S. government in creating counter-Nazi propaganda during World War II and plans for the “Americanization” of post-war Germany after Hitler’s defeat. Bettelheim’s paper was widely distributed and read by American troops; it influenced the American intellectual left. With Adorno and Frankfurt School thinkers, once fascism as a threat seemed to be eclipsed, their attention turned to deciphering the subliminal aspects of propaganda, to the unmasking of authoritarianism, and towards formulating a critique of the consumer society, a society of political consensus and conventional values.49
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The issue of the Jewish identities of these analytic thinkers, particularly their ambivalence about their Jewishness, runs through this literature as a latent subtext. All of our authors originally came from assimilated, secular, cultivated middle or upper middle class Jewish backgrounds. Some achieved assimilation through the process of education, some through psychoanalytic training. Fenichel, Simmel, and Loewenstein were medically trained, Erickson and Bettelheim were lay analysts and university professors. As analysts and psychoanalytic cultural critics they were committed to the precepts of justice and universal good, to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution, all of which had emancipated the Jews. They all opposed or rejected the ghetto mentality for being parochial, intolerant, psychologically and socially out of touch with modern realities and scientific advancements. Jewish observance and ritual did not play a significant part in their lives in Europe before fascism or once in exile in the United States. Yet being a Jew caused them to be demonized, persecuted, and placed in dangerous, potentially murderous situations. None opted for a return to the ghetto, or for a move to Israel or an ideological commitment to Zionism. Many found themselves in an insoluble double bind, which became particularly acute for a survivor of the camps such as Bettelheim: they were Jews without a meaningful connection to Jewish communities or traditions, yet they socialized with other Jews in psychoanalytic associations, in the university, and in their clinical practices. Above all, they needed to come to terms with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and the potential for the unleashing of a new anti-Semitic campaign in their new country. All remained internally ambivalent about their Jewishness, often externalizing their negativity and hostility to themselves as Jews by drawing a static, caricatured, or essentialist portrait of Eastern European ghetto Jews. Though aware of projective mechanisms in antiSemites, these psychoanalysts themselves could and did project. Though critical of the authoritarian tendencies in fascism and in anti-Semitic mass movements, most of these Central European Jews could and did behave in America in distinctly authoritarian styles. They brought with them in differing degrees and tonality an arrogance, superiority, elitism, disdain, and refusal to tolerate democratic cooperation and dialogue with their American psychoanalytic colleagues (many of whom they regarded contemptuously as poorly educated, Eastern European ghettoized Jews, without a deeper appreciation of Freudian psychoanalysis or European culture). As we now know, authoritarianism could be found not just in rightwing, fascist, or anti-Semitic personalities but also in character structures on the left and within the institutions and core of the psychoanalytic movement itself. Many of these thinkers displaced internationalist and cosmopolitan ideas from Socialism into high expectations for the psychoanalytic cause, which they considered an international movement with a liberating potential, not just a therapeutic enterprise. All embodied a distinctly modern Jewish tradition of self-examination, introspection, rationality, and a passion for
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universal theorizing, with varying acceptance of the relativity of values. None easily escaped the double bind of being perceived as Jews even though they had assimilated, shedding much of the trappings of Jewish belief, traditions, and culture. The issue of transformation of the ambivalence about their Jewishness into the structure and organization both of local psychoanalytic institutes and of national associations in the United States needs further research and elucidation which may provide a clue into the origins and durability of the conservatism, authoritarianism, and elitism that continue to 50 characterize these institutions.
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12. 13.
14. 15.
16.
E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York,1961), p. 22. Ernest Jones, The Life And Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3 (New York, 1957), p. 182. Ibid., p. 226. Sigmund Freud “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” (1909) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 10, (London, 1955), p. 36, n.1. Sigmund Freud, “A Comment on Anti-Semitism,” (1938) in The Standard Edition, Vol. 23 (London, 1964), pp. 291-293. Ibid., p. 292. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939) in The Standard Edition, Vol. 23, (London, 1964). Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) in The Standard Edition, Vol. 18, (London 1955). Eric H. Erikson, “On Nazi Mentality,” A Way of Looking At Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980 (New York, 1987), pp. 341-345, ed., Stephen Schlein; Erikson, “Comments on Hitler’s Speech of September 30, 1942,” (1942), ibid., pp. 351-361; Erikson, “Comments on anti-Nazi Propaganda,” (1945), ibid., pp. 362365’ Erikson, “A Memorandum to the Joint Committee of Post-War Planning,” (1945) in ibid., pp. 366-374. Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York, 1951). Erick Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941). Otto Fenichel, “Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism,” American Imago, 1940, Vol. 1 pp. 24-39. Otto Fenichel, “Elements of Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism,” in Ernst Simmel, ed., Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York, 1946), pp. 11-35; reprinted in Fenichel, The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (New York, 1954), Second Series, eds. Hanna Fenichel and David Rapoport, pp. 335-348. Ernest Simmel, “Contribution to Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses,” (1919) (London, 1921), pp. 3-43. Ernst Simmel, “National Socialism and Public Health,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Summer, 1989, pp. 17-26; originally published in Der Sozialistiche Arzt, 1932, Vol. 8, 162-172. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York, 1933).
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17. Ernest Federn, “La Psychanalyse a Buchenwald. Conversations avec Bruno Bettelheim, Le Dr. Brief et Ernst Federn,” Revue Internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, Vol. I, 1988, pp. 109-115. 18. Otto Fenichel, “Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism,” (1946) in Simmel, ed. ibid., p. 18. 19. Fenichel, ibid., pp. 17-18. 20. Ernest Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Simmel, ed., p. 39. 21. ibid., p. 64. 22. Erick H. Erikson, “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” Psychiatry, Vol. 5, 1942, p. 476. 23. Ibid., pp. 490-492. 24. Ibid.: Erik H. Erikson, “Comments on Hitler’s Speech of September 30, 1942,” in Schlein, ed., A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to1980, pp. 351-361. 25. Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York, 1951), p. 40. 26. Ibid., p. 42. 27. Ibid., pp. 54-58. 28. Bruno Bettelheim,"Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol., 38, 1943, pp. 417-452; reprinted as “Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Politics, Vol. 1, 1944, pp. 199-209; and in Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 48-83. Citation from Bettelheim, 1979, p. 61. 29. Ibid., pp. 55-60. 30. Ibid., pp. 61-63. 31. Ibid., pp. 67, 70, 75-81. 32. Ernst Simmel, “Introduction,” in Simmel, Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York, 1946), p. xxii. 33. Otto Fenichel, “Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism,” in Simmel, Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (New York, 1946), p. 30. 34. Erick H. Erikson, “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” Psychiatry, Vol. 5, 1942, p. 488. 35. Robert Coles, Erik Erikson: The Growth of his Work (Boston, 1970), pp. 95-96; Paul Roazen, Erik H. Erikson. The Power and Limits of a Vision (New York, 1976), pp. 94-99; Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York, 1999). 36. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1950), pp. 311-314. 37. Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York, 1951), p. 11. 38. Ibid., p. 107. 39. Ibid., p. 107. 40. Ibid., p. 109. 41. Ibid., p. 159. 42. Bruno Bettelheim, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” (1962) in Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 243-271. 43. Ibid., p. 244. 44. Ibid., pp. 247-254, 258-264. 45. Ibid., pp. 267-171. 46. Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ultimate Limit,” (1968) in ibid., pp. 3-18.
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47. Bruno Bettelheim, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” (1962) in ibid., p. 270. 48. Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (New York, 1983); David James Fisher, “Psychoanalysis and Engagement: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians,” in David James Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1991), pp. 91-104. 49. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Fenichel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950). 50. Francois Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan (Baltimore, 1982); Otto F. Kernberg, “A Concerned Critique of Psychoanalytic Education,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 81, 2000, pp. 97-120; David James Fisher, “Review of Kirsner’s Unfree Associations,” American Imago, Vol. 59, No. 2, Summer, 2002, pp. 209-223.
Chapter Three appeared in History and Psychoanalysis, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004, pp. 57-74; it also appeared in French in the Revue Internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, Vol. 5, 1992, pp. 221-241.
Four
On Parenting and Playing
The good-enough ‘mother’(not necessarily the infant’s own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration. Naturally, the infant’s own mother is more likely to be good-enough than some other person, since this active adaptation demands an easy and unresented preoccupation with the one infant; in fact, success in infant care depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment. D.W. Winnicott 1953
Bettelheim died on March 13, 1990. The obituaries in the popular press emphasized his original and brilliant contributions to the understanding of emotionally disturbed children, to the Nazi Holocaust, and to the possibilities of a creatively applied psychoanalytic cultural criticism. Two significant events in Bettelheim's life decisively shaped the contours and substance of his outstanding career in America: his immersion in psychoanalysis in Viennese Freudian circles in the 1930's and the experience of the Nazi concentration camps. Bettelheim was one of the last distinguished survivors of the second generation of Central European psychoanalysis. From Freud and his teachers, he acquired an over-arching theory of the mind, an understanding of psychosexual stages and a developmental point of view, a therapeutic technique, a persistent commitment to research, a method of gathering data and of observing clinical issues empirically, and, above all, an analytic attitude. The psychoanalytic attitude pivots around openness and wonder toward the
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concept of the unconscious and its determining, if elusive, effects on behavior and mental life; it rejects simple and convenient explanations; it insists on making no alibis about the investigator’s own short-comings, self-deceptions, his infantile or narcissistic traits; it is oriented toward understanding other people uncritically, empathically, that is, from the subjective point of view and circumstances of the other. Bettelheim was arrested and deported to the Nazi concentration camps in 1938; he was first an inmate in Dachau and then in Buchenwald. In the camps he was victimized by the massively traumatic effects of a system of total terror. He was exposed to a situation devoid of safety, characterized by continuous mortal anxiety, severe physical and mental deprivation, perpetual humiliations, and chronic dehumanization. It is difficult to imagine a more debilitating daily existence than the camps: prisoners experienced depression and dejection, loss of weight, frightening lapses of memory, and terrifying fears of going mad. Under the impact of such an extreme, totally controlled, degrading environment, Bettelheim lived, while observing himself and other prisoners. He saw states of mental and physical deterioration, marked by extreme mood swings, wishful thinking, psychotic reactions, sudden rage, suicidal tendencies, sometimes outright suicide, and regression to childhood behavior and modes of thinking, including incontinence. This was an unbelievably shattering and disintegrating experience; the loss of autonomy and self-assertion being equivalent to the ways a small and fragile child feels when controlled by his sadistic parents. Inexplicably released from the camp in 1939 and having emigrated to the United States, Bettelheim found himself at age thirty-six exhausted, emotionally depleted, and without the strength to feel or explain what he had just experienced. He was also burdened by a powerful and numbing form of survivor guilt; he remained preoccupied by the question of why he escaped, perplexed by why others had perished. He was tormented by the awful guilt of having observed comrades and relatives beaten, tortured, sometimes killed before his eyes, without being able to come to their rescue. Fortunate to survive, Bettelheim courageously decided that he would lead a life justifying his survival, one that was life-affirming and appreciative of those counter-Nazi values, namely of compassion, care, kindness, patience, and empathic understanding of others. He was determined to live without forgetting or denying the impact of the Nazi Final Solution, determined to engage all of his energies toward comprehending the inner chaos and loss of control of emotionally disturbed children. Having been rescued from the Nazis, Bettelheim dedicated his life to rescuing children from primitive mental states and severe psychopathology. Bettelheim’s twenty-nine year tenure from 1944 to 1973 at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago is a well-known and documented story. I do not intend to narrate that story. Several points need to be made, however. The Holocaust had convinced him of the need for memory; denial, avoidance, and repression did not assist one with coping with the
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combined horror and “banality of evil” in such extreme situations. The children who entered the Orthogenic School were also victims of trauma, impulsivity, and massive anxiety, sometimes annihilation anxiety. Bettelheim’s strategy was to reverse the structure, intent, and function of the concentration camps by creating an optimal therapeutic milieu for the child. That milieu would be safe; it would facilitate compassionate understanding, even of bizarre, violent, or delusional thinking; it would be a healing environment. The school in short became a humane laboratory for the experiment of recovery and reparation; it was at times a holding environment which pivoted on the fundamental respect for the values of life and for grasping the erratic behavior and inexplicable thoughts of its patients. Those who entered the Orthogenic School were usually the most helpless, difficult, and inaccessible of patients many of whom had already failed in a variety of therapeutic modalities. Bettelheim’s patient population included homicidal, suicidal, severely delinquent, psychotic, anorexic, and autistic youngsters. He placed his heart and intellect, his understanding of psychoanalysis, and his lived experience of the Holocaust, to become the advocate of the helpless child. There is no doubt that his commitment to research, his integrity in working with children, his intellectual seriousness, and emotional sensitivity all converged to produce a prolific and, I think, permanent contribution to child psychology and to milieu therapy. Freud, of course, had emphasized the critical importance of work and love in achieving some level of emotional and psychic balance in life. Bettelheim extended that project by emphasizing the therapeutic importance of milieu and by underscoring the monumental role of play in the child’s inner world and in the development of meaning in his life. Bettelheim’s late work, that is, from the middle 1970’s until his death, was oriented toward comprehending the dilemma of parents and the ambiguities, stresses and strains of child-rearing. To read Bettelheim of these years is to encounter an author with a subtle grasp of the dialectic between child and parent, particularly the interaction between mother and child. He designed these books and articles to serve as a bridge between the parent and the child, especially regarding the enigmatic aspects of child-rearing in an age of chronic insecurity, in an era defined by a fragmented or severed family, in an age where community and common values seem exhausted or entirely negative, in an age characterized by rampant narcissism and child abuse. His wisdom about parenting always carried an ironic touch: while writing a seminal book on child-rearing he warned his reader to be wary of expert advice, including his own. He urged parents to risk thinking for themselves. Freud proposed that the interpretation of dreams was the royal road to the unconscious. Bettelheim suggested that understanding the meaning of play was the royal road to the child’s subjective world. Two attitudes color Bettelheim’s perspective on childhood play. First, that the child’s world of play be accorded its proper dignity. Second, that parents be empathic in trying to know and understand from the inside the
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child’s feelings and inner experiences. Bettelheim unequivocally asserts that play represents an extremely serious activity for the child. It is where he learns comprehension and rules of conduct, develops intellectually, grows psychologically, and where his self-esteem decisively emerges. Through play he learns to persevere even if he doesn’t succeed, persisting despite initial setbacks. Given that play often serves as a secret language of the child’s desires, problems, and anxieties, it is best for parents to approve of and be non-interfering toward the child’s play. Children of course can often detect a parent’s real convictions by the parent’s tone of voice, facial expression, bodily stance, and subliminal signals. Children can read a parent’s approval or disapproval in their non-verbal utterances. They grasp hypocritical or inauthentic responses. In describing the function of play in mother/child interactions, Bettelheim pointed out that the child uses play to understand his environment, as well as to copy parents and teachers and to find meaning in his world. Play also functions as a form of self-healing. For the child play is simultaneously pleasurable and meaningful; when a child performs well at play, it forms the basis for all subsequent feelings of well-being, shaping the child’s future capacity to play with others. Parents, for their part, are enjoined to delight in and validate the play activity; they are not to impose their goals on the child’s thoughts or actions; they are asked to limit their participation and only to offer help if it is requested. Above all, Bettelheim stressed the parent’s inner conviction about the child’s well-being, the parent’s ability to convey their interest in and involvement with the child’s goals and process. For the child’s play to become truly meaningful it must be expansive and imaginative. Bettelheim suggested that the child be given free scope, plenty of room, including elbow room, a space where his mind and imagination can soar, where he can tinker with images and ideas. Bettelheim counseled parents to provide the child with freedom of choice and to share in delight in the child’s playing with toys. Play is a vehicle which may anticipate the child’s future occupations and where the child expresses his fantasies. These fantasies ought to be respected. Any restrictions imposed on these free floating fantasies or day-dreams can be dangerous. Play becomes a crucial arena for the child’s self-discovery; it is through play that the child thinks his own thoughts, thoughts which are essential to his emerging creativity, spontaneity, and autonomy. To enhance his own rich inner life, the child must be provided with leisure and safety. Because of his desire to promote the child’s own initiative, Bettelheim advised parents not to structure rigidly the child’s play activities, not to abort the child’s fantasies before they reach full bloom. Play has a mediating function in the child’s maturation process. Through play the child gradually builds bridges between fantasy and reality. Play eventually encourages the tempering of unconscious desire through the impact of reality-imposed limitations. Play frequently provides the child with significant early experiences of mastery, competence, and compromise,
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especially the compromise between powerful wishes and the necessity of boundaries imposed by reality. As the child evolves from solitary play into a more mature form of games, play still remains a vital bond between the parent and child. Caring and sensitive parents transmit to the child that people can be trustworthy and that attachment can be secure and reliable. In tapping into their own inner spontaneous empathy for the importance of child’s play, adults are urged to understand the age-appropriate unconscious needs of the child. The best method of doing so is through enjoying, approving, and honoring the child’s play. In the same vein, Bettelheim advises parents not to criticize or disapprove of the child’s destructive play, nor to promote shame or guilt about the child’s symbolic sexual explorations and erotic curiosity. If a parent can maintain a positive and empathic attitude towards these explorations of fantasy, it will facilitate the child’s capacity to build a coherent sense of self and to regulate his self-esteem. At the same time the child will feel seen, understood, and the bonds between parent and child will be strengthened. For Bettelheim, then, the child’s play is always enjoyable and significant, even if the precise meanings of play are not always apparent. It helps the child to establish a sense of regularity, permanence, and predictability; it enables him to sense when people (like the mother or maternal guardians) disappear that their disappearance is not necessarily forever, hence not necessarily traumatizing, destructive, or self-destructive. Play has an explanatory and reassuring purpose. It works toward establishing the child's differentiation between himself and others. It enables him to separate and individuate eventually from his parents and siblings. Play helps the child construct a transitional space and use transitional objects (blankets, teddy bears, toys) that permit him to tolerate and adapt to maternal absences. It helps him develop an ability for object constancy and to move toward psychological and cognitive mastery. Bettelheim's advice to parents tends to be sensible, balanced, and judicious. He counsels them to play with their kids with moderation, insight, and restraint. Fathers are asked not to overdo roughhousing. Above all, parents are asked not to overwhelm children with their own anxieties; children have momentous issues to cope with in terms of their own feelings of weakness, smallness, and inadequacy, particularly regarding their sense of helplessness and dependency on parents. Bettelheim invited parents to implement one seminal thought: relate to your child caringly, not critically. Just as the reading aloud of fairy tales fosters relatedness and closeness to children, so play enables the parent to approve of, admire, love, and affirm the child and his age-appropriate tasks. Once parents become emotionally attuned to the inner world of the child, to the pressures on him, to what he can and cannot comprehend, then parents will recognize the child’s vulnerable sense of self-regard, while being validating. This consistent affirmation from the people who are the most significant to him will enhance the child’s mastery over himself and gradually will enhance his ability to relate
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to others. Positive self-esteem enables the child to master and dominate his aggressive urges, eventually allowing him to learn and follow the formalized rules of the game, no matter what the game represents. Ultimately, play serves a civilizing function; it allows the asocial child to be acculturated, to evolve into a caring, loving, empathic human being himself, that is, a human being who is a social and moral being. Play expands into a consciousness of moral values, values which in an optimal setting are freely chosen and self-imposed by the child, but which are attuned to one’s own community and society. Play, in the final analysis, becomes extraordinarily generative in the child’s biological, intellectual, social, and emotional development; it provides him with realistic goals and reasonable control over his unconscious impulses; it allows the child to tame, educate, and sublimate his chaotic, destructive strivings, diverting these urges into symbolic actions and outlets. Anything which promotes the child’s self-esteem permits him to become more civilized. Bettelheim, of course, does not wish to burden parents with utopian or unrealizable guidelines about parenting. Following Winnicott, he invites them to be merely "good-enough," not perfect or ideal. He asks parents to attempt to reach potential happiness with their children through empathically respecting the child’s inner and outer world and by not imposing their own values, anxieties, and narcissistic injuries and fantasies onto the child. This form of loving devotion is the highest form of parental understanding of the child. Let me conclude by saying that I think of Bettelheim the educator as a man of paradoxical character: he was authoritarian and delightful, dogmatic and intuitive, decisive and hesitating, stubborn and charming, sure of his knowledge and always doubting. In short, he was human, all too human. He occupies a unique and special position in the history of psychoanalysis. He was a thoroughly independent philosopher and university teacher who found his own voice and a distinct, outspoken, authoritative voice it was! He belongs to the same great psychoanalytic tradition of the public intellectual as exemplified by the late Freud and Erik H. Erikson. All three intentionally contributed to a wisdom literature, whose function was to mediate between parent and child, to translate the conflicts between intra-psychic structures, and to alert us to the struggle between the individual and his own society. From the experience of the Holocaust and his own fifty years of working with children and parents, Bettelheim expressed and refined his own voice, writing in his own distinct language. He also learned how to communicate his knowledge, how to move his audience without patronizing them. As a man of wisdom, situated on the border between art and science, Bettelheim was also an austere moralist and probing humanist: someone who raised major social and ethical questions. Like Freud, Bettelheim accepted the psychoanalytic ethic of honesty: to be truthful and candid no matter what the cost. This ruthless wish to be honest went with a realism and succinctness in Bettelheim that was notorious. Yet he
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was always tough and realistic about himself, as evidenced by his seventeen books, many of which will endure. My favorite image of Bruno Bettelheim remains the one with his arm around the shoulder of a female child in the hallway of the Orthogenic School; it’s a powerful image, that of a man who was self-assured, protective, reassuring, sensitive, exuding self-confidence, capable of bearing his own doubts and the terrible weight of his own historical and psychic experience with dignity and courage. It is up to all of us, parents, educators, mental health practitioners, and concerned citizens, to continue and perpetuate his work, in the same life-affirming, energetic, and patient manner.
Chapter Four first appeared in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Fall, 1990, pp. 43-48.
Five
The Relationship and Debates Between Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein
What I cherish most are the remarks which reflect your friendship, which means a great deal more to me than all the rest. Bettelheim, 1969. I am grateful for your candor. Friendship is worthless without it. Ekstein, 1984.
The relationship between Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) and Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005) evolved initially from a shared professional commitment to the understanding and treatment of severely disturbed children and adolescents. On an even deeper level, both were European intellectuals, strongly identified with lay analysis, who were profoundly invested in ideas and in the transmission of psychoanalytic forms of knowledge. The two had a joint fascination with the psychology of fairy tales. They had distinct itineraries in the psychoanalytic movement, starting in Vienna and continuing in America. Both were assimilated Viennese Jewish intellectuals who graduated from the University of Vienna with their doctorates in 1937. Their social origins were divergent. Bettelheim came from a cultivated upper bourgeois background, his father owned a lumber factory. Ekstein’s class origins were petty bourgeois, his father was employed as a bookkeeper. Bettelheim’s formal psychoanalytic education never actually began; it was interrupted by Anschluss (Austrian union with Germany) and by his arrest and incarceration in German concentration camps for eleven months in 19381939. He completed his analysis with Richard Sterba, a distinguished analyst affiliated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Ekstein’s clinical psychoanalytic training came out of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’s program of psychoanalytic pedagogy. His earliest professional aspirations
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were to become a teacher. Ekstein began his analysis in Vienna sometime in 1937 with Dr. Eduard Kronengold, a Polish Jew, referred by Anna Freud; it was a very brief and incomplete analysis, interrupted in March, 1938 by the Nazi takeover of Austria and both their needs to escape. When Kronengold emigrated to America, he shortened his name to Kronold. Ekstein was later analyzed by Edward Hitschmann in Cambridge, Mass., who was himself an early member of Freud’s circle, a former analysand of Freud. Both Kronengold and Hitschmann were Socialist in their political orientation, openly sympathetic to Austrian Social Democracy. Both Bettelheim and Ekstein, as third generation psychoanalysts in training, remained intimately identified with the writings and methodology of Freud, although neither had very much direct contact with the founder of the movement in the l930’s, primarily because of Freud’s age and illness and his relative withdrawal from the activities of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Bettelheim said that he met Freud while being interviewed by Anna Freud and Paul Federn as a candidate for admission.1 Ekstein never met Freud, but was electrified seeing him from across the street of Freud’s apartment: “Freud did not teach anymore. He had his own private seminar, you could sort of see him through the window. I had a friend with whom I studied philosophy at Berggasse 20 opposite Berggasse 19 and for a moment you could see Freud go tothewindow. He was a fantastically dominant figure even for those who had never seen him.”2 Both Bettelheim and Ekstein shared the insults, injuries, and promise of exile; both were forced traumatically to emigrate to the United Sates because of the rise of National Socialism in Austria in March, 1938. Bettelheim was arrested and subsequently deported to German concentration camps, spending a total of eleven months in Dachau and Buchenwald. Ekstein escaped in 1938 because of his own dangerous involvement as a socialist militant, member of the Social Democratic Party, and activist in the antifascist underground movement. He had been arrested a number of times for distributing illegal, that is, pro-parliamentary leaflets and served brief sentences in jail. He was triply tainted by the Nazis as a Marxist, Jew, and psychoanalyst. Both refugees made successful even brilliant careers in America, contributing a vast number of papers and books to the psychoanalytic literature, in addition to having high profiles as teachers, lecturers, and educators. They had distinctly different positions regarding the official psychoanalytic establishment in America. Bettelheim remained outside the American Psychoanalytic Association and never joined the faculty at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, occasionally teaching extension courses. He was an academic and tenured professor at the University of Chicago; he directed the Orthogenic School, which was affiliated with the university, but which afforded him a great deal of administrative and clinical autonomy. Bettelheim functioned as an articulate scholar and informed authority on mainstream psychoanalysis, distinguished by his acerbic critiques of
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psychoanalytic pretense and reliance on mystifying jargon. From the 1950’s untilhis death, he was one of a handful of public intellectuals whospoke to a wide, literate public on a variety of social, educational, historical, and mental health issues. While Ekstein never commanded the same level of recognition as did Bettelheim, despite his publication by commercial presses, he remained a significant local and national presence, writing for a specialized audience of clinicians, as well as a figure of some significance in Vienna from 1974 until the mid 1990’s. Ekstein, for his part, endured but never quite overcame the opposition of the American Psychoanalytic Association toward lay analysis. Beginning with his ten-year stint in Topeka, Kansas at the Menninger Foundation from 1947-1957, where he was the training analyst of the lay analysts (medical analysts were not permitted to be analyzed by him because he was nonmedical), continuing in Los Angeles, both at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, from 1958 until the mid 1990’s, Ekstein conducted training analyses, supervised candidates, and lead seminars both within and without the institutes. By the later 1990’s his health required him to curtail his professional activities. Despite his background as a lay analyst, despite the overwhelming power of the medical-psychiatric orientation during his career in America, Ekstein never became a mere functionary or spokesman for orthodox psychoanalysis. He never felt the need to leave the institute and to form a new institute under his leadership; he remained suspicious of the pattern of splits in the history of psychoanalysis, thinking that such splits turned more on questions of personal power than on the persuasiveness of ideas, or the clinical efficacy of new methods. When Ekstein was asked he would speak at institutes not affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. He refused to be parochial or dogmatic. He had no use for psychoanalytic bureaucracies or bureaucrats. When new institutes were formed, he often agreed to join. This became true in Los Angeles when he became affiliated as a training analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (L.A.I.S.P.S.), founded by clinical psychologists and social workers with a dynamic orientation who were prevented from being trained at institutes connected to the American. Likewise, he joined the California Graduate Institute (C.G.I.) in the 1980’s; he affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Center of California (P.C.C.), itself a split from C.G.I. in the 1990’s, which had a predominantly Kleinian and object relations point of view. In answering a question about how he felt about his relationship to the institute, he expressed his ambivalence about bureaucracies and his desire to remain independent and critical of the larger organization, a member of the loyal opposition: I am half outside, half inside. It’s a little bit like a love affair, you know. You have a person in your arms and it feels suddenly the two of you are one. But how often does that happen? How often
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Regarding personality, Bettelheim and Ekstein were distinctly different creative narcissists. Despite his enormous vitality, prodigious capacity for work, and intense focus, Bettelheim was a depressive. He was a highly serious man with a spirit of gravity about him. He did not suffer fools easily. Impatient, tough-minded, authoritarian, easy to anger, Bettelheim had a need to unmask sentimentality, to cut through phoniness, and demolish soft thinking. He was a proponent of the reality principle and was unwilling to tolerate idealistic or romantic conceptions of the personality, of cultural artifacts, or of history. He displayed an ironic sense of humor and he could often be self-deprecating. He intensely disliked pretense and he could be brutally honest, often picking up on an individual’s vulnerabilities and inner conflicts, offering searing interpretations. He had an uncanny ability to make one feel understood and, on the other hand, to make one feel exposed, precipitating feelings of shame and guilt. Ekstein, on the other hand, was significantly lighter in mood and affectivity than was Bettelheim, despite a life history that was saturated by hardship, loss, and trauma. Ekstein had a wonderful knack for interacting well with others. He was likeable, outspoken, but almost always tactful. Though erudite, bookish and a lover and collector of books, he was playful, witty, earthy, irreverent, avuncular, and childlike. He possessed a ready access to his own broad spectrum of emotions and his own rich fantasy life; he could easily laugh as well as easily shed tears. His affectivity was linked integrally to his method of clinical empathy, often speaking of the need of the clinician to feel himself into the world, mind, and soul of the patient. His guiding clinical principle was: tell me in what language I need to speak with you. He was unashamed to be moved by people. Many of his own memories evoked a strong, emotional response. He was a gentle soul. Ekstein preferred to mediate, to build bridges, rather than to criticize or polemicize as did Bettelheim, once joking during a period of institute strife that he would rather “make love, not war.” Charming, intuitive, inventive, sensitive, intellectually curious, with a gift for communicating through metaphor and simile, Ekstein was a distinctly kind and original man who maintained a sense of wonder about individuals, their potential for growth and reflection, a sense of astonishment about the world.4 EKSTEIN’S FAMILY HISTORY Because the personal history of Bettelheim is so well documented, no fewer than three full-length biographies having recently appeared,5 this chapter will focus more on the lesser known Ekstein in order to situate their relationship
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and debates and in order to provide a biographical and historical context for their correspondence. Ekstein’s life history was one of severe loss and trauma and of the continuous process of overcoming serious obstacles to his life and professional pursuits. He was born in 1912 in Vienna, the only child of Charlotte and Ernst Ekstein (1883-1970). He described his father lovingly as “a very simple bookkeeper”6 who never acquired much money in his life. When Ekstein senior arrived in America in 1939 as a refugee, he brought with him ten dollars, all else had been confiscated by the Nazi government.7 Ekstein lost his mother very early in life, possibly between the age of three or four. He claimed to have no specific memories of Charlotte. I lost my mother, very, very early. I was a little boy…I lost a mother that early…It was an early loss and my father was….there was still the war going on…he could not even be at home and he had to turn me over to a stranger…I lost her as a very, very young person…That is so long ago. I grew up a person who has no strong living concept about her.8
Regarding how his mother died, he answered somewhat vaguely: “The way people died. Of that I have almost no knowledge.”9 At the memorial for Ekstein in May, 2005, Robert Wallerstein presented a more poignant version of Charlotte’s fate. Ernst Ekstein had once asked him if his son had ever spoken of his biological mother. Though they had been friends and colleagues for over fifty years, Wallerstein stated that he had not. Ernst Ekstein then narrated what actually happened to Charlotte. She had not died at the outbreak of World War I. Rather, she became psychologically disabled on a permanent basis, no longer able to function, requiring full-time hospitalization or institutionalization. She perished sometime during the 1940’s during the period of Nazi domination of Austria.10 Ernst Ekstein, for his part, was a kind and caring man, who did all he could do to raise, nurture, and educate his only son. They lived on Hunzpasse in the Ninth District in Vienna. His father left Vienna to fight in World War I, resulting in a long separation between them. He was probably stationed in Slovakia, fighting with the armed forces of the Austrian Emperor. The child Ekstein, already distressed by the loss of his mother, now had to face a long separation from his compassionate father. Ernst Ekstein left the child under the loving care of a housekeeper, Emilie Neudorfer, whom Ekstein described in glowing terms as a reliable caretaker and surrogate mother: “She was a wonderful, faithful Catholic lady who took me sometimes to church to pray with me and taught me prayers for Papa. She taught me he would come back from the war, and I was utterly convinced he would.”11 Ekstein had to be hospitalized for several months sometime between the age of ten and twelve because of chronic ear problems. He never recovered some hearing in one of his ears, always burdened by this physical defect. How
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ironic that this future psychoanalyst who specialized in subtle forms of listening came into his profession with a significant impairment in hearing. The hospitalization deeply shocked the young man, not only because of the insensitivity and brutality of the hospital staff, but also because of his witnessing the “innocent sadism” of the treatment of other patients and because he was prematurely exposed to terminally ill and dying patients.12 His own hospitalization severely set him back in terms of his performance at school; he began to fail; his self-esteem plummeted; he was filled with feelings of shame and unworthiness. A number of teachers recommended that he go to trade school, thinking him incapable of handling the rigors of academic work.13 Ekstein had to repeat a year because of bad grades, the pressure of competition, and lost time because of the hospitalization. His father interceded on his behalf against the advice of the school authorities, saying at a school conference that he wanted his son to continue on an academic track, not to be sent to a trade school.14 His father hoped that he would pursue a more practical career, something like engineering or law. What helped Ekstein turn things around for himself educationally became emblematic for his entire life. In an autobiographical essay written in the third person singular, blending objectivity and a slightly distancing tone, he remembered: “He had taken hold of himself and within a few months moved toward the top of the class.”15 In addition to his father’s support and encouragement to continue in school, an empathic teacher took a liking to him, requesting that he read aloud to the class an essay the young Ekstein had written. This same affirming teacher asked him to tutor students in his own class and to take on younger struggling students. He identified with learning disabled children and children in trouble. Yet, he did so with a rebellious edge. He wanted to teach them in ways that far surpassed his own teachers. He would reach them by empathizing and understanding the subjective struggles of the learning child. Much of his desire to teach grew out of a rebellious spirit which required that he teach better than his teachers and that he understand the children better. He identified particularly with the troubled child except that he wanted the troubled child not to accept his fate. It was a strange double identification. He accepted the goals of the teachers, but struggled against their methods.16
EKSTEIN AND AUSTRO-MARXISM Ekstein came of age in Vienna in a historical context in which Austrian Socialism and the Austrian Social Democratic Party had reached its highest point of influence in the First Austrian Republic, 1918-1935. Austrian Social Democracy appealed simultaneously to workers, union members, and to intellectuals. Austro-Marxism, the ideology and platform of the Austrian Social Democrats, was more of a radical mass movement than the reformist
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and bureaucratic German Social Democratic Party, and more democratic than Leninist Bolshevism in the 1920’s and 1930’s in the Soviet Union. AustroMarxism can be thought of as a middle road between revolutionary socialism and Soviet Communism in the period between the wars. The party had distinguished intellectuals in leadership positions, including Max Adler, Friedrich Adler, Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Karl Renner. It published a party daily newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung. One of its members, Karl Seitz, became the Mayor of Vienna from 1923 to 1934, the period of “Red Vienna.” If Austrian Social Democracy possessed competent, sincere, and somewhat anguished and indecisive leadership, it also produced a respectable and original form of Marxism, a democratic Marxism taken very seriously by its membership and by members of the Socialist youth movement. The Social Democrats viewed themselves as revolutionaries who would be willing to take to the streets. They were capable of armed struggle. They acted as integral anti-fascists. On two such occasions—the spontaneous Vienna insurrection of 1927 and the insurrection of February, 1934—the resistance to fascism was rapidly and brutally defeated. Nonetheless, there was a willingness to take arms against fascism, not just make speeches and offer empty rhetoric.17 The cultural politics of Austro-Marxism were exceptionally significant and highly resonant in Viennese intellectual circles. Vienna in the later 1920’s and early and middle 1930’s became a socialist bastion against Catholic and conservative political forces, as well as forms of Austrian fascism which enjoyed increasingly wide appeal in the provinces. Austro-Marxism developed into a socialist experiment referred to as Red Vienna, becoming an increasingly isolated enclave in a context where Austria was moving toward reaction and tyranny. They insisted that the principles of socialism, including class struggle, were fully compatible with democratic forms of government and with the commitment to self-government. Arguing that the social movement ought to be democratically structured, not based on an authoritarian model, they embraced the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Austro-Marxism was more indebted to Kant than to Hegel. Kantian Marxism posited an idea of ethical socialism, a socialism of humane values, and a socialism that emanated from the intellectual and moral universality of Marxism. For Kantian Marxists the individual was seen always as an end, never a means. If all human beings were ends in themselves, workers could not be treated as commodities; no individual could be objectified. Furthermore, the free development of the individual had to take place in voluntary associations, the goal of which was to create a human brotherhood, with community feeling and community responsibility. Kantian socialism moved in the direction of a psychological theory, one that was opposed to metaphysics and which placed an emphasis on a theory and practice of ethical values. Man was a social being, who through the mediating vehicle of a transcendental consciousness, might strive toward the unity of human beings and strengthen the ties between them. Under a socialist form of society, then,
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man might ultimately be free to realize his potential and restore himself to his own fully human nature, while building social organizations that were free, rational, and self-determining. Social democracy became the agency for individuals to create economic and cultural equality while curing class antagonisms.18 The Austrian Social Democrats produced a specific, distinguished, and highly effective program of social welfare and social improvement in Vienna during these years. The experiment of “socialism in one city” included important innovations in health care, including dental and childcare, and youth clinics. They attended to leisure activities, for instance, constructing and operating sports facilities and public swimming pools. There was a radical housing policy and a municipal building project to house workers and the unemployed. The housing projects were financed by property and luxury taxes on the wealthy. Austro-Marxists also successfully implemented major social reforms such as the eight-hour day, paid vacations for workers, the recognition of collective bargaining for unions, regulations of children’s, women’s, and night labor. As part of their commitment to the creation of a “new man,” Austro-Marxists implemented youth organizations, adult education, libraries, bookshops, theaters, festivals, and lecture series for its membership.19 These impressive cultural achievements were designed to create decent living situations for poor people and workers, an educational sphere oriented to teach and uplift proletarian children. Most historians agree with that the “politics of pedagogy” of Austro-Marxism were far more successful than its political record. Devoted to Bildung, the education and cultivation of individuals with moral character, the Austro-Marxists were committed to and achieved a vast program of social democratic innovation. Given the widespread dissemination of anti-Semitic prejudice in Austria, Austrian Social Democracy was less contaminated by anti-Semitism than any other party in Austria; yet, there were unflattering and anti-Semitic stereotypes in the Social Democratic movement, even among leaders of Jewish origin. Ekstein’s involvement with the Viennese Socialist youth movement decisively shaped not only his consciousness but also his political orientation and personal ideals in this period. Socialism became a key component in the formation of his sense of self. He was drawn both to the ideological as well as to the utopian facets of Austro-Marxism. First of all, socialism appealed to him because he wanted to change the world, to rid the world of social classes and those socio-economic forces that promoted nationalism and world wars. He found compelling the mixture of individualism and social responsibility in the Socialist ethic. He was enthusiastic about the educational and cultural efforts of Austro-Marxism, loving to quote a Socialist slogan: “We Socialists have led the Viennese workers from the gin bottle to the workers’ symphony concert.”20 Ekstein himself, attended lectures at the workers’ school, organized under the auspices of the Social Democratic Party, finding them often more illuminating than those at the University of Vienna. He recalled vividly the memory of Edgar Zilsel lecturing on Spinoza as an example of the quality of the
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intellectual fare offered up to the workers in this era.21 Combining a model educational and social welfare system, Ekstein quoted the words of Julius Tandler, who was a Welfare Minister in Vienna, to capture the core humanism of the Socialist project: “He who builds palaces for children tears down the walls of prisons.”22 As an adolescent, he embraced the utopian side of Socialism because he was convinced that without it one could not be a sensitive and compassionate man. With the increasing polarization of Austrian society between left and right, between Social Democracy and fascism, the utopian aspects of Austro-Marxism helped him to hold on to his ideals. “He [Ekstein] spoke about his feelings that the utopias, unreachable goals, eternal longings never to be fulfilled, only approximated, nevertheless had to be a guide for him who wanted to be a decent person.”23 Socialism for Ekstein meant moving young people toward a better world, where everyone could strive for “selfrealization.” He became a leader in the youth movement, with a command of theory, but also a fine oratorical style. He conceived of leadership morally; he opposed more radical leaders who tended to indoctrinate rather than educate followers, who saw youth “as more tools of the state or of the party apparatus.” 24 Even in his most radical phase as Marxist, Ekstein was suspicious of propagandistic and bureaucratic aspects of his own ideology and social movement. As Ekstein became aware of pressing social issues, such as hunger, poverty, unemployment, and the ominous rise of fascism, he became politicized. Marxism appealed to him because of its debunking stance toward the existing social system, because it resonated with his rebellious and critical attitudes, and because he shared its moral dimension, its opposition to inequality, its commitment to the socially oppressed, and its belief in social justice. Yet he was always drawn to members of the Socialist movement who had some understanding of themselves. Already interested in the study of psychology, recognizing that the knowledge of psychology would be crucial in all teaching and learning activities, Ekstein gravitated to Alfred Alder and attended Adler’s lectures for several years before going over to the Freudians. Adler, of course, was known as a Socialist and he lectured five minutes away from the university. “Before I went to the analysts, I went to Alfred Adler’s lectures. So for a while I was in danger of becoming an Adlerian! Adler was a Socialist, a Social Democrat, so that’s where I had to go.”25 While on a summer holiday in his early twenties, Ekstein was told by friends about a book by Siegfried Bernfeld, Sisyphus ,or the Limits of Education (1925)26 that significantly changed his life. Bernfeld attempted to combine Marxist sociology with Freudian psychology in a manner that intellectually and emotionally excited Ekstein. He asked his friends where he could learn more about these teachings. He was told about the program led by Anna Freud and August Aichhorn to train psychoanalytic pedagogues. It was a “movement” which opened up psychoanalytic perspectives to kindergarten, elementary and high school teachers:
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It [Sisyphus, or The Limits of Education] was an early attempt to synthesize Marxian understanding of the social world and Freudian understanding of the inner world. The social world, Bernfeld suggested, sets the outer limits of education, while the inner world of the child, his unconscious, sets the inner limits for the influence of the educator. It was this book which made the young man look for places where he would learn more about Freud than was possible through the reading of his work in the university library. The university was critical of Freud. Where was there a source of direct learning?27
In a very real sense, Ekstein never moved beyond his early experiences as an Austro-Marxist. His experiences with Socialism, his participation in the anti-fascist resistance, his involvement with workers’ education all stayed with him, marking his personality and his value system, helping him to become the man he became: “The youth movement’s search for truth, for genuine purpose, that search for an ideal world and the perfect social system, was carried out most of the time outside the academic institutions. While he attended course after course, he found the greatest personal meaning in that youth movement.”28 Ekstein summed up his experiences of Austrian socialism by underscoring its impact on his him as an ethics of compassion and kindness and simultaneously an exhilarating sense of social solidarity, of belonging to a social movement: Red Vienna is an example of not merely a political party, a program of promises, but was a movement. I still have the songs of that time in my mind, which were the background of a new ethics. It was an ethics of sharing, of caring, and to use the words of Alfred Adler, growing Gemeinschaftsgefühl [community feeling].29
MORITZ SCHLICK AND THE WIENER KREIS Ekstein’s specialized study in philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna drew him to the seminars of Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), who was the founder of the Wiener Kreis, or Vienna Circle of logical positivism, established in 1928. Schlick, himself, was a count from an old Protestant aristocratic family from Czechoslovakia. Building on the heritage of Ernst Mach, placing an emphasis on the primacy of experience and direct observation, the Vienna Circle was adamantly scientistic, engaging in a fierce polemic against all philosophical systems that were metaphysical. Surrounded by philosophers of science and mathematicians, such as Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann, and Herbert Feigl, Schlick’s circle waged a dogmatic battle against all philosophers who searched for values; their disgust with most of the official state of European philosophy moved them toward a critical
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analysis derived from exact sciences, specifically mathematics, theoretical physics, and chemistry. Although Schlick remained in close contact with Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein never formally joined his group. For many years Schlick thought that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921) might become the epistemological foundation for their theories.30 Schlick’s Vienna Circle provided a new inspiration for a sophisticated positivism, grounded in empiricism and derived from inductive disciplines. He and his followers carefully focused on the relations of language to the world. If knowledge of the world could be rendered in clear, functional language, if the world could be described in scientific language, philosophy would jettison its muddle-headedness. Philosophical thinkers would finally be able to differentiate between meaningful and nonsensical propositions. The truth or falsity of a statement resided in verification. A proposition only made sense through its means of verification. Clearly, Schlick and the logical positivists were attempting to construct a theory of meaning. Many of their formulations were rigidly dogmatic, eventually leading to a philosophical conviction that transformed philosophy exclusively into the analysis of language. All claims to higher truth, all theological or metaphysical arguments, were rejected as unscientific and meaningless, unable to be verified or falsified. The direction taken by the logical positivists meant that philosophy would be less accessible to an educated public of ordinary cultivation and intelligence.31 Ekstein’s study with Schlick, culminating in the writing of his dissertation on The Philosophy of Psychology (1937)32 placed him in direct contact with leading thinkers of the logical positivist school. In two of his earliest philosophical papers published in America, Ekstein’s debt to Schlick is explicit in his terminology. In his 1941 paper, “The Philosophical Refutation,” he asserted that “The statement that a statement makes sense if and only if it is definitely verifiable does not refer to the actual usage of the language but only to the usage of certain key terms within a language.”33 His 1942 paper “The Language of Psychotherapy and of Everyday Life,” perpetuated the logical positivist antipathy toward metaphysics, with only a slight degree more tolerance: “However, we do think that metaphysics solves problems or answers questions. Only in a metaphorical sense may we say that music, art, or metaphysics solves ‘problems.’ These ‘problems’ cannot be answered like questions.”34 He recalled that Schlick’s method of teaching was not to have his students memorize or regurgitate the great thoughts of master thinkers in the history of philosophy. Rather, it was to pose the question: What did a given philosopher mean? How could one understand a philosopher’s language and engage in dialogue with that language? From Schlick, he slowly came to value having his own thoughts, how to play with ideas, how to philosophize. On one memorable occasion, Schlick refused to accept an Ekstein seminar paper, requiring that he rewrite it, emphasizing his own thoughts and analysis, not a paraphrase or restatement of the ideas of others:
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING When I wrote a term paper for Schlick, he gave me the term paper back and he said to me, ‘You gave an excellent account of my thoughts, but if you want to be a doctor of philosophy, you must have thoughts of your own. Unaccepted!’ At first there was anger that he didn’t accept it. Then I got depressed. ‘I will never amount to anything. I must hurry to get the doctor degree. I will never get it!’ And suddenly the thought comes to my mind, ‘I can have thoughts of my own.’ And I wondered, ‘Can you write a dissertation that has thoughts of your own?’…But Schlick was a philosopher of a completely different sort. He said, ‘You must have thoughts of your own.’35
Ekstein experienced Schlick as a kind but remote teacher. Although enormously admired, he also discovered a mentor whose self-esteem did not require discipleship; he would not have to become a blind follower of Schlick’s to remain in his favor. From Schlick he received affirmation of developing his own concepts, of formulating his own language, which would enable him to find his own pathways and his own voice in his mature years. Schlick’s distance also helped Ekstein develop an optimal clinical stance, one that stemmed from close, empathic understanding of the other, but simultaneously one which permitted enough space to generate a valuable perspective on the various meanings of the patient’s utterances. The young man experienced those exciting years with his great teacher, deeply idealized, distant, not really allowing intimate contact, but nevertheless deeply touched him, as an inner revolution. He learned from and through his teacher how to think…That capacity for distance later became an important ingredient for the future therapist. It would enable him to listen to people, to their inner conflicts, without taking sides, to remain equidistant from the conflicting forces, in order to recognize their nature and to help develop a solution.36
Ekstein’s divided loyalties between Schlick’s philosophical method and his growing commitment to Socialism and to psychoanalytic theory and practice became dramatized in Schlick’s seminar when his beloved Siegfried Bernfeld presented a paper on his attempts to measure libido. Bernfeld was preoccupied with finding a precise scientific grounding for instinctual drive theory, which ultimately required quantification. According to Ekstein, Bernfeld had an extremely difficult time demonstrating his thesis, with Schlick countering that libido was at best a relative concept that could not be measured or empirically verified. I remember Bernfeld sitting in the seminar of Waismann and Schlick, and for me, at the time, it was a very difficult situation because I went two ways. I remember the inner struggle. Am I to believe in him to whom analysis is important along with Marxism
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and socialist thinking, or am I to believe in him who says ‘I will teach you how to have thoughts of your own and how to think!’37
Schlick had finally accepted Ekstein’s doctoral thesis but shortly before his scheduled oral examination in 1936 was murdered on the steps of the University of Vienna. Although there were rumors that the shooting of Schlick was politically motivated, in all probability his assassination stemmed from a personal grudge by a deranged former student. The murderer later became a member of the Nazi Party and was pardoned for his crime two years later. Ekstein was examined at the oral by another professor, Robert Reininger, who had been friendly with Schlick, and despite his great anxiety and sorrow, he passed the exam and received his doctoral degree. But it went fine, and no sooner did I have the doctoral degree then I knew the time had come to escape or go to prison. Freud escaped. He went to London and my escape also began in London. Freud was still alive—no more Schlick—and a little while later, in 1939, we lost Freud, too. It was now a life where one’s intellectual fathers belonged to the past. Fascism came and I had to gather together all that I had and to see what I could do, in another country and to have thoughts of my own.38
PSYCHOANALYTIC PEDAGOGY Schlick’s method of analysis subverted philosophical systems by showing that they were meaningless because they overstepped the rules of language. Yet Ekstein began to perceive that Schlick’s philosophical method was lacking, discovering “that this new philosophy was also an incomplete instrument.”39 In reflections conducted by his teachers and in a developing self-reflection, Ekstein began to ponder the issue of “the meaning of meaning.” He soon grasped that “the whole system of human communication had areas of meaning far beyond the ones that the scientist had in mind when he immersed himself in his research.”40 Having studied academic psychology with Karl and Charlotte Buhler, largely to realize an ambition to receive formal recognition for university achievement, he gravitated to the Freudian psychoanalytic institute to learn about the inner world of the individual. At age twenty-two in 1935, the young Ekstein met Dr. Willi Hoffer and inquired about the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute’s program for educators to become psychoanalytic pedagogues. Hoffer asked him how he became interested in psychoanalysis; Ekstein answered that he had read Bernfeld’s book, Sisyphus, or The Limits of Education. He began the program the very next week, subsequently finding out that Bernfeld and Hoffer were lifelong friends and early collaborators on work with orphaned Jewish refugee children from Poland after World War I. Ekstein’s life history and intellectual life shifted dramatically as he began his training as a psychoanalytic pedagogue.
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The program in psychoanalytic pedagogy was open to lay analysis and many of the instructors, including Anna Freud and August Aichhorn, were non-medical clinicians. Freud’s liberalism extended to the issue of lay analysis; he explicitly wished psychoanalysis not to be a medical specialty. Ekstein was ignited by Hoffer, who was a Socialist and a member of the Freudian left. He regarded his immersion in psychoanalytic pedagogy as membership in a new social movement, small in number, but potentially quite efficacious. “In Vienna in those days, when I began psychoanalytic training, I experienced psychoanalysis as a movement, as a promise of change, of methods of healing, of methods of education, and also of political insights.”41 Prior to his entrance into the program of psychoanalytic pedagogy, Ekstein had been tutoring learning impaired children, beginning when he was twelve or thirteen years of age. He did it to earn money, which was scarce, but also because he was impassioned about education. He began to ponder the question of how children learn. Working with children and adolescents with learning difficulties exposed Ekstein to a vast variety of psychopathology. 42 Once in the program, Hoffer began to supervise him on a number of children he was tutoring. “I was then trained to be a psychoanalytic pedagogue because I wanted to be a teacher who understands the soul of children and not just the subject to be taught…”43 Tutoring became the first step in Ekstein’s evolution toward becoming a clinician. Exposed to a number of brilliant and intellectually exciting teachers, taking courses from figures like Bertha Bornstein, Edith Buxbaum, Heinz Hartmann, Kurt Eissler, Robert Waelder, Jenny Waelder, Ernst Kris, August Aichhorn, Willy Hoffer, and Anna Freud, Ekstein received a thorough grounding in Freudian psychoanalysis and the emerging paradigm of ego psychology. Psychoanalytic pedagogy was not differentiated from psychoanalytic psychotherapy in this first phase of its history; and in the context of his training, he moved from educational zeal to more therapeutic concerns. He began to imagine himself as a clinician.44 Ekstein argued that the concept of adaptation, developed by Hartmann, must be understood dialectically, that is, that it was not a linear concept designed to foster conformism or social adjustment to the status quo. Rather adaptation meant that one could mobilize one’s intellect and energies to transform the social environment, making it more responsive to individual emotional needs: “…the task of psychoanalysis is not merely to adjust to the world, to adjust to environment, but also to prepare for it, that the adjusted one learns that the environment, the world, adjusts to his needs. Adaptation is a dynamic concept. Not only must I change myself, but I must contribute to change, to adapt the world.”45 It is quite possible that Ekstein was offering a Socialist interpretation of Hartmann’s concept of adaptation. Ekstein saw Hoffer as a man of exceptional reliability, loyalty, and personal integrity. He viewed him as a friend, despite their difference in age. When he spoke of Hoffer in his later years, tears would come to his eyes. Hoffer supervised him individually, often took walks with him, and conducted
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seminars in coffee houses. At one point, Hoffer encouraged him to get his M.D. degree, thinking it would make his psychoanalytic career easier (Hoffer himself, though a Ph.D., went to medical school).46 Hoffer also played a key role in urging Ekstein to leave Vienna and helping secure for him a visa to England. Not only did Hoffer live up to his promise to help, but when Ekstein arrived in London he invited him once again to participate in the old seminar of psychoanalytic pedagogues.47 Ekstein also had great affection and respect for August Aichhorn, author of Wayward Youth, a 1925 psychoanalytic study of delinquency.48 From Aichhorn, he learned how to deal with impulse ridden, acting out, and deceitful adolescents; his method consisted of winning their trust by being more deceitful than they were, despite a façade of friendliness and seductiveness. His main talent was that he could out-do all these youngsters –he out- delinquented them. He had a way to present himself that they identified with and by identifying with him he helped them to find a way out of waywardness. They identified with him, saying ‘I go with him because he’s a bigger gangster than I am,’ and in this way they became Aichhornians!49
Ekstein worked with Anna Freud in the period she was completing her book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. His encounter with her resulted in a massive shift in his professional identity and his sense of self. After hearing Anna Freud lecture, he was so captivated that he decided to leave philosophy as a profession. “She came in, and she talked. And I said, ‘you know, this was such a strange experience. Such a strange experience. I’ve never heard anything like that. I think I’m going to give up the study of pure philosophy.’”50 Ekstein’s early experiences with Anna Freud are described with almost Biblical analogies and with the metaphors of love. And Anna Freud had a way about her. One sort of instantly fell in love with her. Where she goes, I go. But you know, if you understand the hint, she was really untouchable, because she was a true Freudian. She tried to develop what her father did and she never married. So that all of us had a fantasy—Anna, Anna, Anna. So while none of us got Anna, we all became Freudians—Anna Freudians!51
Though he experienced her tough-minded criticisms, he emphasized that Anna Freud’s point-of-view was consistently objective, useful, and never ad hominem; he always learned something from her critical remarks, even if they initially troubled him. At bottom, he viewed her as a tolerant person, not wishing to impose her way of seeing the clinical material, allowing him to make his own choices. “It was only through Anna Freud that I could learn to
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think [clinically].”52 When Anna Freud criticized Ekstein’s work with autistic and psychotic children later in his career, he reiterated that he could improve and clarify his work based on her insights. Internalizing her voice prompted Ekstein to be self-analytical, to develop ways to sharpen his thinking, to think against himself, and to avoid intellectual complacency and self-congratulation. I wrote it in such a way that when Anna Freud listened to it, she could say ‘I never treated such children; I admire that work; it is not my way of working. Those are not the children that come to me.’ But I could see the point…I realized I could improve the paper because she identified with me and at the same time would not fully swallow it. I do the same myself. I don’t fully swallow what I wrote five years ago, what I wrote yesterday. The moment it is finished, I start to oppose it, because if I couldn’t oppose it, why should I write another paper, if I would say here’s the final word and in that sense I believe we need that dynamic struggle.53
Although he dedicated two of his books to Anna Freud, celebrating her seminal contribution in his article on the history of psychoanalytic pedagogy,54 Ekstein never became a blind follower or apostle of Anna Freud’s. Ekstein emerged out of the volcano of Red Vienna in the 1920’s and 1930’s, a tumultuous social era as Vienna turned fascist, with a composite ego ideal of the Socialist youth movement, Schlick, Anna Freud, and Freud. He studied with people who never wanted mere uncritical followers. He cherished the concept of independence of the mind. He retained from his Socialist origins a stance of compassion and care for people in need of help, a desire to be an active and participating part of a community and a society. In both his personal and professional life, he attempted to turn situations of hardship or misfortune into opportunities of hope. The once traumatized and overwhelmed boy would reverse the situation by caring for the traumatized, collaborating with them to seek creative solutions. Ekstein the Socialist militant, educator, psychoanalytic pedagogue, and philosopher always identified with the courageous and struggling underdog, aligning himself with Sisyphus and his ethic of perseverance, work, and quiet dignity, attempting to integrate the vast repository of knowledge bequeathed to him. His itinerary, he believed, describes the impossible tasks of the Jewish intellectual in anti-Semitic Vienna, who, while never entirely fitting in, never becomes an insider, but always tries to use his knowledge base and experience to alleviate needless misery, oppression, and ignorance.55 As an educator and as an analyst, Ekstein was committed to a very specific form of emancipation both of the student and of the patient. He had no interest in manipulation, no investments in forming mirrors of himself, or of shaping students who idealized him. Recognizing the inevitability of generational revolt, appreciating the creative dynamic of rebellion of the sons
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and daughters against the parents, he functioned in ways that would permit others to become maximized version of themselves, distinct and different from him. Not threatened by an individual’s separation and individuation from himself, linking maturation to forms of differentiation, his writings and clinical work fostered that emergence of difference. To reach this goal, he did not become married to theory, or devote his life to the construction of a fully systematic, fully integrated theory. He preferred to embrace the vitality and diversity of life with all of its contradictions and conundrums. He liked to quote Goethe: “Grey, dear friend, is all theory, but green is life’s golden tree.”56 Paradoxically, it was through a strong identification with Freud and with the still incomplete revolutionary nature of the psychoanalytic movement that grounded Ekstein, propelling him to serve as both an heir to that history and tradition and a distinct spokesman, with a unique voice in the present and the future: Allow yourself to speak like a poet, like someone who’s not afraid of a metaphor. Many people in the beginning of learning must do exactly as they are taught before they become themselves. I think that the greatest thing that analysis can do is to let the patient that one has…to grow away from us and not become a follower. I am a Freudian; it’s all right, but I am not a follower of Freud. Because if you read what I write, you will see that much of it did not occupy him; other things occupied him. And much of the language that I use didn’t occupy him. It all goes back, not only to my education in philosophy, but to that early teacher. When you write, write so that its your story.57
THE BETTELHEIM-EKSTEIN RELATIONSHIP Though Bettelheim and Ekstein both attended the University of Vienna, shared a number of professors, and became involved with the psychoanalytic movement as lay analysts, they never met in pre-World War II Vienna. Ekstein knew Bettelheim’s second wife, Trude, who had some training as a psychoanalytic pedagogue.58 Both developed an early interest in working with severely disturbed children; both were influenced by Anna Freud; both were brutalized and dislocated by the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Vienna; both suffered profoundly by the invasion of Austria by the Nazis in 1938. Here is how Ekstein remembered those early days in his obituary for Bettelheim: …when we needed a new home in order to overcome the trauma of those days when we were driven out, or, driven as he was into a concentration camp. I had personally known of the Austrian Fascist police prisons, but I was lucky enough to escape only to hear that the day after my escape the SS came to take me to another prison from which there was no escape.59
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For ten years from 1947 to 1957 Ekstein was the Director of the Child Psychotherapy Program at the Menninger Foundation, where he began to develop a psychotherapeutic method to treat psychotic and autistic children. Karl Menninger discovered Ekstein through reading a number of his published papers in the 1940’s, bringing him to Topeka, Kansas, where the former had gathered some of the best and brightest psychoanalytic thinkers and clinicians in the United States. One of the works culminating his stay at Menninger’s was the 1958 text, co-authored with Robert Wallerstein, on psychoanalytic forms of supervision. This much under-estimated book, blending erudition with practical advice, put forward the still very useful concept of “parallel process” in the supervisory situation. Ekstein and Wallerstein pointed out how frequently the therapist’s dynamic issues become integral aspects of the counter-transference/transference matrix and were replicated in the supervisory relationship.60 As he continued to publish papers in various psychoanalytic journals, Bettelheim became aware of his work. Their paths crossed at a number of conferences and Ekstein was conscious of Bettelheim’s writings. They finally met in the middle 1950’s in Chicago at the home of the psychoanalyst, Maxwell Gitelson. Ekstein was taken aback by his first encounter with Bettelheim, finding him abrasive, dismissive, mixing praise and criticism, but above all, brutally honest. After their introduction, Bettelheim said: “Oh, you are Rudolf Ekstein. I recently read a paper of yours in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. It was a beautiful paper, well-written, and occupied with matters that are of great interest to me. But it was all wrong.”61 So jarred was he by his first meeting that he forgot his own reply. Ekstein does not cite the work of Bettelheim in his 1966 work, Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse, a path-breaking volume that addressed both the diagnosis and treatment of borderline children, at that time a poorly understood clinical population; Ekstein also courageously opened up the discussion of countertransference issues in working with severely disordered patients, citing the works of Winnicott and Money-Kyrle. Without embracing a Kleinian point of view, he indicated his clinical awareness of early disturbances between child and mother, as well as a sensitivity to working with part objects and introjected body parts that have become almost a franchise for those with a Kleinian-Bionian perspective. Bettelheim’s influential 1967 book, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self cites five of Ekstein’s articles, but not his book.62 He admired but criticized Ekstein for his use of the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel in illustrating how the rejecting mother figure operates in the internal world of the psychotic child; Ekstein approached the paranoid projections of the suspicious child as an unconscious fantasy, externalized in the figure of the devouring witch. Bettelheim suggested that the destructive mother symbolized as a devouring witch was more than an unconscious fantasy, but rather represented the child’s internal picture of the actual destructive intent of the mothering person; that is to say, he argued that it was
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not a fantasy, but was “anchored in the reality of the child’s experience.”63 In that same text, Bettelheim favorably cited three other papers by Ekstein, which described psychodynamically the psychotic mechanisms of distance regulation among children who had grave difficulties forming close and warm attachments. “I do not further discuss Joey’s using space to ward off dangerous closeness since this particular psychotic mechanism has been discussed much more fully than I can here by Ekstein [1954] and Ekstein and Wright [1952, 1954].”64 A friendly competition grew between Bettelheim and Ekstein, centered on Bettelheim’s impressive record of publications, as well as his influence in academic, psychoanalytic circles, and amid the literate public. Ekstein, ten years younger, always felt four books behind, admiring and envying his older colleague.65 There was a serious disagreement with Bettelheim that became quite acrimonious. It concerned the question of what constituted the necessary structure for change with regard to the treatment of severely disturbed children. Bettelheim stressed the construction and maintenance of a total therapeutic milieu, an environment which would facilitate the change and growth of the individual patient. Ekstein asserted that it was individual, analytically oriented therapy, ultimately the acquisition of insight that was mutative for the disturbed child. “I had a rough time with Bruno, because occasionally I came to Chicago to teach there and he believed it’s the environment that changes the child while I believe it’s the psychotherapy that changes the child. We had a long friendly battle.”66 Ekstein felt that Bettelheim’s effort aimed at establishing a “living space” for his patients at the Orthogenic School, while he tried to introduce a “talking space,” in which play and self-understanding could be brought to bear on the inner workings of the abnormal mind. Ekstein also worked closely with a hospital setting at the Menninger Foundation, but found himself relatively powerless to influence the workings of the psychiatric hospital and its staff.67 Ekstein’s 1968 review of The Empty Fortress in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly climaxed this stage in his relationship with Bettelheim. This sympathetic but critical analysis of Bettelheim’s masterpiece cogently deciphered the latter’s problematic place in the psychoanalytic world. Ekstein’s review was exceptional if we remember that the mainstream psychoanalytic periodicals of the day had totally ignored Bettelheim’s publication. In finding Bettelheim’s case studies “insightful and compassionate,” he also complimented him for a balanced account of both successes and “insurmountable difficulties” with these cases.68 Bettelheim so much privileged the healing effects of creating an environment that he failed to present detailed discussions of the techniques he used in working with these disturbed children. Just as he eschewed stating his own metapsychological theory, Bettelheim never elaborated a theory of technique, necessary to transmit his clinical methods to others in the filed. Lastly, Ekstein perceptively viewed Bettelheim’s role as an oracle, as a
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charismatic leader and moral crusader, with exalted powers and flashing intuitions both into his staff and the unconscious processes of the children he treated. Bettelheim evoked polarizing transferences, shifting between affectionate and hostile feelings. Likewise, Bettelheim’s brilliance, innovativeness, and toughness generated wildly divergent reactions, some idealizing, others devaluing. Bettelheim’s charisma and his emphasis on milieu obstructed the diffusion of his therapeutic techniques. Since Ekstein himself struggled to develop similar clinical perspectives, enabling them to be studied and debated, as well as be financially and institutionally supported, he urged Bettelheim to articulate his clinical method more specifically in subsequent publications. Otherwise, his work would remain elusive, diminishing the clinical and cultural influence it deserved: Bettelheim might then think of his own place – his personal place in the clinical field as well as the institution he heads – as an embattled fortress, or an isolated island, if you please, tied to a unique personality and his positive and negative charismatic qualities. Being occupied for many years with concerns similar to Bettelheim’s, I have wondered how these great gains in the treatment of psychotic children can make their way into the professional and scientific community, and how a treatment philosophy inspired by a great pioneer can become accepted, supported, and a teachable treatment technique.69
Only with historical retrospect did Ekstein realize that both he and Bettelheim had advocated extreme positions; over time, he sensed that some reciprocity was possible and necessary: It took years for the two collaborators to appreciate the value of the other’s perspective, years before they would agree to the mutual value of milieu and individual therapy. But the years have taught me not to believe either that individual psychoanalytic treatment per se can be the method of cure. He who works with severely disturbed children must create a facilitating environment, must come to grips with issues as to how to work with parents, how to work with separations, and how to combine different agents of treatment. 70
At first, Ekstein experienced Bettelheim’s fervor for the total therapeutic milieu as one-sided, omniscient, and fanatical, as if he were expounding a new religion. He saw that Bettelheim used his horrific experiences in German concentration camps to construct a therapeutic community, potentially becoming a “home for the heart,” a full fortress, which would permit the slow and gradual restoration of the self to occur. He conceived of Bettelheim’s pioneering efforts at the Orthogenic School as the creation of “a concentration camp in reverse.”71 In other words, Bettelheim’s therapeutic milieu was organized to protect and provide safety for the
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vulnerable child without permitting outsiders, including parents, to disturb the environment. Children were not treated like prisoners, were not locked up, even though he designed the optimal therapeutic milieu in opposition to most psychiatric hospitals. As the friendship evolved, as Ekstein visited the Orthogenic School in 1967 and other times, engaging in dialogue with Bettelheim and his staff, teaching and presenting his own work, he came to value Bettelheim’s underlying sensitivity and empathy that was often disguised beneath his forceful rhetoric and aggressive tone. To read Bettelheim, Ekstein advised, we ought to regard him as a social reformer, a crusader; we ought not to be dissuaded by his high-handedness nor his polemical style. Bettelheim has his allies and his enemies. And while within the fortress he resembles the soft hearted sabra, when he comes out to challenge he has a veneer that is experienced by others as tough and authoritarian. This book [A Home for the Heart] contains some rather open and firm statements which attack the status quo to make us unhappy about existing mental health institutions. He leaves no stone unturned to bring out in the open, as he must, the inadequacies of the care for the mentally ill, children or adults. We might, then, read him defensively, by reacting to what appears to be provoking, opinionated attacks, or we might reflect on the provocative model that he and his dedicated staff offer us. 72
Ekstein moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and became a Director of the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center for twenty years. During these fertile decades, he continued his researches into borderline, psychotic, and autistic children, edited The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin, collaborating with psychoanalysts and analytically oriented clinicians to conduct research on the severely disturbed child and adolescent. Simultaneously, Ekstein conducted training analyses at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, supervised candidates, taught seminars, and led study groups both within and without the confines of the institute. During this period, he produced four books, building on his clinical experience and research: Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse (1966); From Learning for Love to Love of Learning (1969); The Challenge: Despair and Hope in the Conquest of Inner Space (1971); and In Search of Love and Competence (1976).73 Ekstein collaborated with Bettelheim in a 1969 issue of The ReissDavis Clinic Bulletin, publishing Bettelheim’s piece “The Education of This piece was later Emotionally and Culturally Deprived Children.”74 republished in the 1969 book by Ekstein and Motto on psychoanalysis and education.75 Also in 1969, The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin ran a full page photo of Bettelheim, “On the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.” In his “Introduction” to that issue, Ekstein extolled Bettelheim as a “pioneer in our field.” He went on to say:
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Bruno Bettelheim, whose unbelievable energy, whose dynamic leadership, whose passionate dedication to his work, whose constant contribution to the literature make it difficult to believe that he is celebrating with us his sixty-fifth birthday. As I once suggested to him, the Orthogenic School is not an empty but a full fortress, ready to defend and to attack in the interests of his patients.76
Although Bettelheim and he had disagreed in emphasis, they were now prepared to learn from one another. Instead of total therapeutic milieu versus individual analytic treatment, Ekstein asserted that support systems were as vitally important for patients as was individual psychotherapy.77 THE RIMLAND AFFAIR In turning to the Rimland Affair, an important series of confrontations between psychologist, Bernard Rimland, and both Bettelheim and Ekstein in the late 1960’s, we need to point out that Rimland’s 1964 study, Infantile Autism, was the first serious book length monograph on autism to be published. Rimland was himself the parent of an autistic child. His text was a panegyric against any and all psychological explanations for autism, sharply disputing that autism resulted from environmental factors or inadequate parenting. Not only did he eschew the hypothesis of a psychogenic etiology of autism, but he argued that assuming such causes was “not only unwarranted but actively pernicious.”78 He proposed that autism was a neurophysiological disorder, speculating that it arose from a dysfunction in the reticular formation in the brain stem. Rimland’s biological approach, buttressed by scientistic language, statistics, and empirical evidence, would become the dominant psychiatric paradigm of the diagnosis and treatment of autism from the 1970’s into the current era. In response to a written request from Rimland, Bettelheim refused to share data or to collaborate on the genetic testing of autistic children with him, indicating his full opposition to Rimland’s method and conclusions: I regret to inform you that I am very critical of the approach you are using to study infantile autism. In my opinion your book contains gross errors and misstatements. I therefore shall give you no help in a study of autistic children which I consider ill-conceived and based on erroneous and biased judgments.79
Bettelheim’s polemic with Rimland spilled over into print when The Empty Fortress appeared in 1967. He admitted that too little was currently known about infantile autism to resolve the question of organicity versus a psychogenic approach. Both hypotheses had value; Bettelheim was not himself prepared to rule out the later appearance of some dysfunction in the central nervous system. More research needed to be conducted. Yet, he was
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unconvinced by the biological approach to autism, remaining committed to finding a cure based on psychological dynamics.80 There were some areas of convergence between the two. Bettelheim found himself in agreement with Rimland that psychologists ought not to blame the parents of autistic children and that the study of autism was potentially of critical importance in terms of advancing the science of psychology, helping to provide more specific knowledge about the origins of the self.81 Yet as a psychoanalytic researcher, Bettelheim insisted that the attitude and role of the parents were “precipitating factors” necessary but probably not sufficient in causing the disturbance of autism. But even if it turned out one day that the parents’ contribution is indeed crucial, they did as they did because they could not help themselves to do otherwise. They suffer more than enough in having such a child. To make them guilty would only add to the misery of all and help no one. 82
Regarding treatment, Bettelheim found himself in total disagreement with Rimland who debunked psychotherapeutic efforts as useless. Bettelheim saw his entire volume of case studies and his life’s work as an answer to Rimland’s repudiation of psychotherapy and milieu therapy. He insisted that patient improvement could be observed and documented and, moreover, that such improvements could restore both affectivity and intellectual function to this population. Bettelheim opposed Rimland’s defense of a treatment built around psychopharmacology and other medical interventions; for him medication merely changed autism into feeble-mindedness, eliminated the selfhood of the patient, and further reduced the patient’s contact with the social world by substituting for it the tranquillized effects of a “drug world.”83 By studying autistic children as “neurological structures” and not as people, as “a human being in his own right,” as Bettelheim put it, by not investigating autistic language and the messages embedded in that language as meaningful, Rimland was both dehumanizing the autistic patient and returning to a pre-Freudian view of the world, which radically circumscribed the pursuit of rational knowledge and curtailed the expression of freedom:
I believe that the royal road to the understanding of mental disease is the patient’s own uncovering of the hidden meaning of his overt behavior, and what caused it. To demonstrate that even autistic children can do this was in fact another main purpose of this volume. In their case, too, knowledge makes them free.84
In his 1968 review of Ekstein’s Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse, Rimland delivered a series of broadsides against psychoanalysis, offering up a number of snide and condescending remarks about Ekstein’s methodology without ever once discussing the substance of
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the book. Rimland positioned himself as the defender of the parents of psychotic children crusading against guilt-inducing therapists. In this travesty of a book review, Rimland neither offered a summary nor a clear discussion of the central ideas of the text, having next to nothing to say about the case material, the methodology, the use of metaphor in the interpretive strategies, the call for further research, or the summary of the existing literature. From the vantage point of empirical science, he summarily rejected psychoanalysis for being without a solid theoretical foundation, finding its therapy totally lacking in efficacy. After alleging that Ekstein lived in a dream world and that his language was obscurantist, Rimland nastily accused him of offering “typical psychoanalytic explanations” as well as “dubious and far-fetched interpretations.” Rimland sarcastically lambasted analysts for the stupendous expense of psychoanalytic treatment for children, by implication caring more about making money than the well-being of families. Lastly, he attacked Ekstein (curiously employing psychoanalytic terminology) for ignoring thirty years of “empirical studies” that undermined the scientific validity of psychoanalysis: At this point the reviewer must become a critic or a super-ego, or perhaps even a therapist, insisting that the writer face reality, or at least acknowledge it, rather then remain in their dream world where they pretend that the distasteful empirical research does not exist. Is not the facing of the sometimes unpleasant reality what psychoanalysis is supposed to be about? Therapist, heal thyself!85
Though upset about the tone and content of Rimland’s review of his book, Ekstein replied tactfully and tactically several months later. He sought out Bettelheim’s advice on how to proceed in a now missing letter, which Bettelheim replied to in July, 1968. Having attempted to dismantle the psychological approach to autism in his 1964 book, Rimland was now attempting to discredit the entire psychoanalytic therapeutic approach to severely ill children in his blanket repudiation of Ekstein’s work with psychotic and borderline children. Ekstein sensed a sadness about Rimland’s review, speculating that it might have emanated from “a deep and personal resentment, perhaps a hurt.” He disliked being lumped into a catch all category of psychoanalysts, which eliminated individuality and specificity: “He has formed for himself a picture of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts that forces him to put all of us in one category to which he reacts negatively rather than write a book review that is really concerned with the author and his independent work.”86 He pointed out the many innovations, imaginative concepts, and metaphorical insights offered in the book, in addition to attempts at “untypical theorizing” in order to push insights to other levels of understanding. He rebutted the insinuation of psychoanalytic greed by stating that many of his cases were seen for free or for extremely low fees. Instead of admitting a significant divergence of opinion, he found Rimland’s piece representative of
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intolerance, of a “stage where we talk at each other instead of to each other.” Authentic bridge building between those who came from widely different fields was perhaps premature. Rimland’s writing worked against authentic unification of knowledge, against building a synthesis of the behavioral sciences. For now, Ekstein addressed his work to psychoanalytically oriented researchers and clinicians who were eager to learn more about severely disturbed children, in order to provide a more clinically grounded and humane approach to these children and their families: My comments, then, are written in defense of many serious and devoted people who as psychoanalytic therapists and researchers have given their time and their compassion in order to help such children and parents. We know that compassion is not enough and that we must constantly think how we can combine it with new methods of research and training that will push the limits of our skill, of our capacity to endure the work and maintain it, and of our insights beyond the present boundaries…Readers, perhaps a little less involved in the work than I, may decide the question better. In the meantime, his book review must stand, and it will remain a reflection on my work as well as on his. 87
Rimland himself had the final published word, continuing his tone of abusive denunciation both of psychoanalysis in general and of Ekstein in particular. He evinced no interest at all in bridge building, once again using sarcasm, as well as the language of psychoanalysis to score points against the analytic enterprise: I very specifically directed my remarks to his having completely ignored the massive research accumulated over four decades, that directly contradicts the assumptions on which psychoanalysis is founded, and that indicates psychoanalysis to be quite without therapeutic effect. I objected to his not even mentioning the almost uniformly negative empirical evidence, suggested that he had ‘repressed’ it, and urged that he (and other psychoanalysts) ‘confront reality.’ His reply, like his book, contains no sign of recognition that these empirical problems exist, despite my strenuous efforts to bring the issue to his conscious awareness. Instead of addressing the issue, he psychoanalyzed me from a distance (telepychoanalysis?) and described my review as expressing personal hurt and resentment. I find Ekstein’s nonresponsive reaction peculiar, interesting, but not surprising, in view of the substance of my criticism.88
THE BETTELHEIM-EKSTEIN CORRESPONDENCE The Bettelheim-Ekstein correspondence consists of twenty-two letters written over an eighteen-year period, from 1967 to 1985; they cover the period from the publication of The Empty Fortress to the death of Trude Bettelheim in
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October, 1984 and Bettelheim’s plans to move to Los Angeles to live with his daughter Ruth, a practicing psychologist in Southern California. A German scholar, Roland Kaufhold, a specialist on the history of psychoanalytic pedagogy, has previously published eleven of these letters in English facsimile, along with an excellent introduction in German.89 The letters cover a lot of ground. They deal with clinical concerns, particularly around the multiple issues of treating severely disturbed children, and the varieties of solitude, isolation, and countertransference disruptions that may trouble the researcher and clinician in dealing with such sick children on a daily basis. Ekstein clearly identified with Bettelheim’s style of presenting case histories, complimenting his older colleague on having his theoretical concepts emerge out of the clinical material, providing a method of presentation that highlighted clinical specificity. The letters also speak to shared professional and psychoanalytic concerns, collaboration and mutual support on the Rimland Affair in 1968-69, joint publications, mutual appearances at conferences, and exchanges of books and articles. The letters provide ample evidence of mutual affection and esteem between the two. They also illustrate a subtext of friendly competition and envy: on Ekstein’s side, of Bettelheim’s fame, productivity, and self-assurance; on Bettelheim’s side, of Ekstein’s youth, vitality, and optimism. Bettelheim’s persona in these letters is one of graciousness and gratefulness. He appears a bit surprised by Ekstein’s warm acknowledgement of him and his work. He comes across as the more austere, reserved, and formal of the two, even as the dialogue deepens. Ekstein clearly seems more informal, engaging, and affective; he remains the Socialist internationalist, the cosmopolitan intellectual, approaching the somewhat volatile and opinionated Bettelheim with tact and understanding; he appears ready to reflect on Bettelheim’s perceptions even if they are offered in a blunt and authoritarian manner, even if they are expressed in an angry and critical tone. Bettelheim at times offers unsolicited advice, urging his colleague in 1968 to leave private practice to affiliate full-time with a research university, where at least some genuine intellectual discussion and serious research was being conducted. By the time of these exchanges in the late 1960’s, Bettelheim had evolved into a social conservative, albeit an iconoclastic one; he was intolerant of anti-Viet Nam War demonstrators, sharply critical of Marxist and left-wing forms of social and political analysis, concerned about preserving the autonomy of the university. As a Holocaust survivor, he adamantly wished to preserve an accurate memory of the historical and psychological dimensions of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the complicity of Austria and Germany in the systematic extermination of six million Jews. He never desired to or became part of the Jewish mainstream in America, who often found his writings on the concentration camps insensitive to the Jewish victims.90 Ekstein, for his part, remained an Austro-Marxist, that is, a cardcarrying Socialist, one who sustained his ethical commitment to social democracy. He continued to march proudly in the May Day parade in Vienna,
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remaining connected to and in agreement with the politics and programs of the Social Democrats in Vienna. “I am still a member. I go back and pay my dues every year. I just don’t tell it to the police in America.”91 In America, this translated as having politics somewhat to the left of the American Democratic Party. He claimed that he had given up his youthful radicalism as he matured, becoming more sympathetic to liberalism as a political philosophy; this coincided with his discovery that there did not exist a social movement or political party in America that could replace his early commitments to the Socialist youth movement. In short, he was a left-liberal, much more oriented toward social change through his activities as a clinician, teacher, lecturer, and writer. The social democratic Ekstein is much more forgiving of the generations of Austrians and Germany born after World War II and fascism than was Bettelheim; he did not attribute guilt by association to all Central Europeans. To be sure, Bettelheim never entirely recovered from his devastating experience as an inmate in two Nazi concentration camps; that powerful imprint always remained a reference point for him. This became thematized in the correspondence with Ekstein in 1984 around their respective disagreement about contemporary Vienna, with Ekstein expressing, especially as he grew older, a more sentimental view of the city, an idealized view of its culture and history. For Bettelheim, Vienna was at best an ambivalent site of memory. He reiterated that Vienna was fundamentally the city of Schonerer, Lueger, and Hitler, having given birth to modern, exterminating anti-Semitism; to see it as Ekstein did only as the city of Freud, Alfred Adler, Wittgenstein, and Herzl was a gross distortion. Bettelheim’s perception of Vienna and Austria was a darker one, based as it was on his concentration camp experience and his researches on the psychological dimensions of fascism both on Germans and Jews. He asserted that contemporary Vienna remained latently anti-Semitic; he found himself put off by the silence, denial, and refusal of Austrians to take responsibility for their embrace of Nazism. Without such a continuous reflection, he could not believe that anything attitudinally and intrapsychically had changed. This was true for the current generation of Austrians, as well as for their parents and grandparents. He reminded Ekstein of the historical fact that the Austrian SS was far crueler than the German SS in the concentration camps, adding for good measure that he had encountered a particularly vicious and insidious anti-Semitism among people on the left, including workers and members of the Social Democratic Party. Socialism, in short, was no antidote to racial anti-Semitism. As an aggressive conservative, Bettelheim matched his assaults on the American left and anti-war opposition by firing some critical shots at Alfred Adler and the Socialist, utopian perspective. He disputed the notion that one could change the human condition by changing society, root and branch. Radical changes of society would not change human nature, would not eradicate human aggression, nor make human beings more happy or fulfilled.
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Ekstein, of course, was no stranger to anti-Semitism, having encountered it throughout his youth in Vienna, including confrontations with Nazi youth at the University of Vienna. Though he articulated a love of Vienna, expressing a nostalgia based on a gilded notion of the good old days, he also resented Bettelheim’s pontification, needing no object lessons on the evils of the Holocaust. He, too, believed that the dark memories of the Nazi era had to be maintained, that forgetting was ill-suited to those who suffered and died in the past, and that such amnesia ill-served the present generation. Ekstein, however, visited Vienna every year for eight or ten weeks as a guest professor at the University of Vienna from 1974 through the mid 1990’s; he saw himself somewhat romantically as a wanderer and mediator between progressive circles in Vienna and Los Angeles. He preferred bridge-building to virulent polemics and denunciations. The young people he encountered in either his teaching or supervisory situations were often born after 1945, thus having had no direct participation in the Holocaust. For Ekstein, the doctoral dissertation of a young Catholic woman from Salzburg, Dorothea Oberlauter, Rudolf Ekstein: Life and Work 92 spoke to the possibilities of young Austrians from conservative and provincial backgrounds to grasp his life’s experience historically and critically. He was not prepared to condemn an entire generation for being ignorant of the death camps and the gas chambers. Ekstein tried hard to have a dialogue with Bettelheim on these issues. He agreed with Bettelheim on Freud’s concept of thanatos, or the death drive.93 He responded to Bettelheim’s scolding language and his exhortations, by assuring his friend that he would make mention of the Holocaust in his public lectures, that, he too, was committed to keeping alive these dreadful but necessary reminiscences about the past. As the letters grow more intimate in the later 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, we read of reciprocal plans for visits, joint appearances at conferences in the States and abroad, and a shared interest in the lives of the families and children. Bettelheim’s final letters, documenting his shock and sadness at Trude’s eventual terminal illness are quite poignant. There is great pathos in these letters. One of the strongest and most intimate is a hand-written one, undated, probably written in October, 1984, bearing witness to his unbearable pain at Trude’s death. Here the powerful older brother, previously haughty and self-assured, becomes terribly vulnerable, barely able to pull himself together. Ekstein’s responses show his tender sensitivity to the psychological pain of profound mourning; he becomes aware of Bettelheim’s descent into depression which would eventually result (after the period during which these letters were written) in recurrent episodes of preoccupation with suicide and plans for his own suicide.94 Bettelheim clearly looked on his friendship with Ekstein as a source of comfort and strength. Reversing the earlier tone of the letters, where Ekstein appeared to be courting the approval of the older and more illustrious man, the final years of the relationship display a different kind of fraternal dynamics,
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with the younger man offering consolation, sympathy, and presence, urging Bettelheim to persevere, despite his major losses, deteriorating health, the rupture of his filial relations with his daughter, and the pervasive sense that time was running out on him. In the years that Bettelheim lived in Los Angeles, Ekstein and he would speak frequently on the telephone, visit each other’s home at least once a week, and share a weekly lunch at a local delicatessen. At bottom, these letters testify to a unique friendship with a somewhat old world quality. Two serious men, widely different in temperaments and in sensibility, united over time in a shared experience of work in an attempt to keep alive the history of psychoanalysis, committed to the clinical, cultural and research efforts of lay analysis both within and without the university, and finally endeavoring to preserve and update the psychoanalytic project of finding a deeper and more penetrating understanding of both children and adults.
Notes l. David James Fisher, “A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim,” in Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick, 1991), p. 169. 2. Samuel Wilson, “An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D.,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Spring, 1990, p. 2. 3. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 85, l998, p. 695. 4. David James Fisher, “In Memorium: Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005),” American Imago, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 225-233. 5. Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and Legacy (New York, 1996); Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 1997); Theron Raines, Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 2002). 6. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalysts Talk (New York, 1994), p. 262. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p.263. 9. Ibid., p. 264. 10. Robert S. Wallerstein, “Rudolf Ekstein,” unpublished paper delivered at the Ekstein Memorial, New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA, May 1, 2005. 11. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalyts Talk, p. 263. 12. Ibid., p. 269; Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” [1973] in The Language of Psychotherapy (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 198. 13. Ibid., p. 199. 14. Ibid., p. 190. 15. Ibid., p. 199. 16. Ibid., p. 200. 17. I. Duczynska, Workers in Arms: The Austrian Schutzbund and the Civil War of 1934 (New York, l978); E.J. Hobsbawn, “Introduction,” in Duczynska, Workers in Arms, pp. 1-10. 18. Leszek Kolakowski, “Austro-Marxists, Kantians in the Marxist Movement, Ethical
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19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Socialism,” in Main Currents of Marxism: The Golden Age (New York, 1978), translated by P.S. Fall, pp. 240-276. Peter Loewenberg, “Victor and Friedrich Adler: Revolutionary Politics and Generational Conflicts in Austro-Marxism,” in Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York, 1988); Anson Rabinbach, ed., The Austrian Socialist Experiment, Social Democracy and Austro-Marxism, 19181934 (Boulder, Colorado, 1985). Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 200. Samuel Wilson, “An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D.,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p.18. Rudolf Ekstein, “Preface,” in Peter Heller, A Child Analysis with Anna Freud (Madison, Connecticut, 1991), p. xi. Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 201. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 204; Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 679. Siegfried Bernfeld, Sisyphus, or The Limits of Education [1925] (Berkeley, CA, 1973), translated by Frederick Lilge. Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 204. Ibid., p. 202. Rudolf Ekstein, “Forward,” in S. Gardner and G. Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology 1918-1939 (Westport, CT, 1992), p. viii. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973), pp. 211-212, 214-215; Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York, 1990), pp. 241-243, 283, 286; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus [1921] (London, 1961), translated by David F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. William H. Coates & Hayden V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe (New York, 1970), pp. 329-333. Rudolf Ekstein, Zur Philosophie der Psychologie [1937}, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Vienna, 1937. Rudolf Ekstein, “The Philosophical Refutation,” (1941), in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 12. Rudolf Ekstein, “The Language of Psychology and of Everyday Life,” (1942), in ibid., p. 20 n. 1. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 678. Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, pp. 202-203. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 681. Ibid., p. 676. Rudolf Ekstein “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 203. Ibid., p. 204. Rudolf Ekstein, “Sigmund Freud and Politics and A Return to Immanuel Kant’s ‘The Strife of the Faculties,’” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Spring, 1990,
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p. 11. 42. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalyts Talk, pp. 270-271. 43. Ibid., p. 272. 44. Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 206. 45. Rudolf Ekstein, “Sigmund Freud and Politics and A Return to Immanuel’s Kant’s ‘The Strife of the Faculties,’” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 7. 46. Samuel Wilson, “An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 17. 47. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalysts Talk, pp. 284-285. 48. August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth [1925] (New York, 1935). 49. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 685. 50. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalyts Talk, p. 278. 51. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 685. 52. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalysts Talk, p. 279. 53. Samuel Wilson, “An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D.,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 25. 54. Rudolf Ekstein and Rocco Motto, From Learning for Love to Love of Learning: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Education (New York, 1969), pp. 3-27. 55. Rudolf Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” in The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 199. 56. Samuel Wilson, “A Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D.,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 29. 57. Virginia Hunter, ed., Psychoanalyts Talk, p. 281. 58. Rudolf Ekstein, “My Friend Bruno: The Way I Remember Him,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Fall, 1990, p. 25. 59. Ibid. 60. Rudolf Ekstein and Robert S. Wallerstein, The Teaching and Learning of Psychotherapy (New York, 1958). 61. Rudolf Ekstein, “My Friend Bruno: The Way I Remember Him,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 26. 62. Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (New York, 1967), p. 463. 63. Ibid., p. 71. 64. Ibid., p. 296, n. 11. 65. Rudolf Ekstein, “My Friend Bruno: The Way I Remember Him,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 27. 66. Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 692. 67. Rudolf Ekstein, “My Friend Bruno: The Way I Remember Him,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, p. 26; Ekstein, “In Quest of the Professional Self,” The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 272. 68. Rudolf Ekstein, “Review of Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2, 1968, p. 296. 69. Ibid., p. 297. 70. Rudolf Ekstein “In Quest of the Professional Self,” The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 273; Daniel Benveniste, “A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 692.
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71. Rudolf Ekstein, “A Home for the Heart by Bruno Bettelheim,” The Language of Psychotherapy, p. 273; this was first published in the Bulletin of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, 1974, pp. 13-15. 72. Ibid., p. 273. 73. Rudolf Ekstein, Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse (New York, 1966); Ekstein and Rocco Motto, From Learning for Love to Love of Learning (New York, 1969); Ekstein, The Challenge: Despair and Hope in the Conquest of Inner Space (New York, 1971); and Ekstein, In Search of Love and Competence (New York, 1976). 74. Bruno Bettelheim, “The Education of Emotionally and Culturally Deprived Children,” The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin, Vol. 6, Spring, 1969, pp. 5-15. 75. Ibid., in Ekstein and Motto, From Learning for Love to Love of Learning, pp. 235244. 76. Rudolf Ekstein, “Introduction. The Project on Childhood Psychosis: Second Report,” The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin, Vol 6, Fall, 1969, pp. 58-59; Rudolf Ekstein, “The Full Fortress,” Psychiatry and Social Science Review, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1969, pp. 2-8. 77. Rudolf Ekstein, “Introduction. The Project on Childhood Psychosis: Second Report,” The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin, p. 59. 78. Bernard Rimland, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior (New York, 1964), p. 62. 79. Letter from Bruno Bettelheim to Bernard Rimland, March 25, 1965, cited in Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, p. 280. 80. Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, pp. 401, 403. 81. Bruno Bettelheim, Ibid., p. 404; for a critical discussion, see D. Patrick Zimmerman, “Bruno Bettelheim: The Mysterious Other—Historical Reflections on the Treatment of Childhood Psychosis,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 81, No. 3, 1994, pp. 411-450. 82. Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 431. 83. Ibid., p. 431. 84. Ibid., p. 404. 85. Bernard Rimland, “Review of Rudolf Ekstein’s Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse,” Contemporary Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 7, 1968, p. 383. 86. Rudolf Ekstein, “Rudolf Ekstein’s Rejoinder to Rimland,” Contemporary Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1969, p. 41. 87. Ibid. 88. Bernard Rimland, “Rimland’s Response to Ekstein’s Rejoinder,” Contemporary Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1969, p. 123. 89. Roland Kaufhold, “Rudolf Ekstein:‘und meine Arbeit geht weiter,’” Psychosozial, No. 53, 1993, pp. 45-53; Roland Kaufhold, Annaherung an Bruno Bettelheim (Mainz, Germany, 1994), pp. 276-288. 90. David James Fisher, “Toward A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Fascism and Anti-Semitism: Perceptions from the 1940’s,” Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004, pp. 57-74; Paul Marcus and S.A. Rosenberg, Re-evaluating Bruno Bettelheim’s Work on the Nazi Concentration Camps: the Limits of his Psychoanalytic Approach,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 81, No. 3, 1994, pp. 537-563. 91. Daniel Benveniste, A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein,” p. 686. 92. Dorothea Oberlauter, Rudolf Ekstein. Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1985).
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93. S. May, “A Tribute to Meaning. A Conversation Between Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein,” unpublished typescript, May, 1990. 94. David James Fisher, “The Suicide of a Survivor: Some Intimate Perceptions of Bettelheim’s Suicide,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 591-602.
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11 January 1967 Bruno Bettelheim, Ph.D., 5725 S. Kenwood Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637 Dear Bruno, I was, today, surprised and pleased and also quite a bit envious, when I received your beautiful new volume on The Empty Fortress. I could instantly lose myself into that book, identify myself with it, and I found so much in it that is so closely related to my own way of working and writing. There is that poetic title which tells so much. There is your reliance on constant clinical illustration, on case material, and your attempt to center the whole argument on cases. One has always the feeling, and this is something I am trying to do with my own writings, that you do not use case material in order to illustrate concepts, that is, to suffer [sic] from foregone conclusions; rather, that you occasionally use concepts (if you permit me the phrase) to illustrate case material. Of course, some of the material I knew. I greeted that mechanical boy as an old acquaintance of mine. Some of these children, somehow, I have met in my own experience and, to me, they are vital confirmations of their experience. The book will do a lot of good among us in our group. We will work on it. There is one more thing I want to say about my feeling like a kindred soul. I do know, as I think I have mentioned to you and Fritz last time, about the lonesomeness that goes into this kind of work; and the isolation one feels from those of whom one originally, perhaps, expected the main support. I do also know that some of this isolation and lonesomeness actually helps us with the work; in part, is self-induced and, in that sense, perhaps well deserved. It is the counterpart that one must mobilize in one’s self in order to work with these empty fortresses and to see to it that they will be filled with the spirit, with the mind that makes for genuine strength. You are a little older than I; thus, you have succeeded perhaps a little better than I in creating for yourself that isolation. I have often thought that I could avoid that, and sometimes I still play with this idea. After all, if one writes books and teaches students and appeals to people, one expects all the positive response. Or, should one just write these books for one’s self and for a few like-minded people?
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That book of yours will again be a big success. I don’t know whether you will enjoy that success, just as I do not quite know whether I can allow myself to enjoy mine, if it will be forthcoming. But, your book has all ready made one big dent upon me. I have just gone through a few pages and I am all ready restless with the feeling that I owe it to myself to work more forcefully on some material which has kept my mind restless. I will try to work now on a systematic presentation of the treatment of such children and I shall try to see if I can somehow go beyond the case studies. Also, I hope that your book will give these people in the community whose support we need for practical work, and the students, enough push in the right direction. I look forward to seeing you again and shall visit at Orthogenic School again the next time I am in Chicago. I want to bring some material about my work and talk to you and the group about it. I will then also bring along that book of yours so I can get your personal inscription signed into it. To you and Trudy [sic], my congratulations and my affection.
Herzlichst. 1 Rudolf Ekstein Ph.D. RE/tls VIA AIRMAIL
1. Herzlichst in German means heartily, from the heart, with warmth.
These letters were given to David James Fisher by Rudolf Ekstein because of their historical and documentary value. They are reproduced by permission of Jean Ekstein Tiano, trustee of her father’s estate.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO – ILLINOS 60637 THE SONIA SHANKMAN ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL 1365 EAST SIXTIETH STREET The Rowley Professor of Education Midway 3-4604 January 20, 1967
Dr. Rudolf Ekstein Reiss-Davis Child Study Center 9760 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles, California Dear Rudi: How very nice of you to write me such a lovely letter on my new book. It means a great deal to me that you read it and took the trouble to let me know your reactions. I am looking forward very much to your next visit to Chicago, both to see you at leisure and, let me invite you again, to talk to our staff on any topic, at any time convenient to you. Unfortunately the funds I have available are meager, but we will be happy to pay you, for a one hour meeting, a token honorarium of $100. In any case I am looking forward to seeing you very soon. With best regards from house to house.2 As always yours, Bruno Bettelheim BB:mt
2. “beste Grusse von Haus zu Haus” is a standard German greeting at the end of a letter, best translated as “with kindest regards to you all.” This is one of the moments when the two analysts whose mother tongues were both German play with a literal translation from German while writing to each other in English.
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SEVENTH – FIFTH ANNIVERSARY YEAR THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Chicago – Illinois 60637 THE SONIA SHANKMAN ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL 1365 EAST SIXTIETH STREET The Rowley Professor of Education Midway 3-4604 July 25, 1968 Dr. Rudolph Ekstein Reiss-Davis Child Study Center 9760 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90035 Dear Rudi: Thank you very much for your letter and for having sent me a copy of your letter to Rimland. I am much moved by the spirit in which your letter is written and I have enough personal experience to really have empathy with you and your troubles. I must say I admire the letter you wrote to Rimland because I could not write such a humane letter, I am simply too angry for it. It is a beautiful letter, but totally lost on him. I would strongly advise that you write to Contemporary Psychology saying that when Dr. Rimland sent you a copy of his review you wrote him this letter to which he did not reply, and that you would appreciate it if Contemporary Psychology would reprint it with a note that Dr. Rimland failed to reply to your letter. If Contemporary Psychology should print the letter, a little bit of my waning faith in mankind would be restored. If they do not print it, then please take a second step and send the whole correspondence, that is, a copy of the book review, of your letter to Rimland, your letter to Contemporary Psychology, and their reply, to Maslow as the President of APA so he knows what is going on in his Association. I know this all means time and trouble, but really not much time, and I think we all should do what we can to educate those who are willing to be educated. In some ways I am more fortunate than you because, having settled for an income that is much smaller than yours, and possibly more difficult working conditions, as a reward I have the University on my side. After everything has been said, the academic community nowadays is the only one which, at least to some degree, extends the courtesy of listening even to those with whom it disagrees. Since you are considerably younger than I, let me suggest that you
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consider the possibility of becoming a University Professor. It will take some doing, but I am sure you would enjoy it and not mind the reduction in income. I am sure you will find that it gives you a different scope, with much less aggravation. I certainly look forward to reading anything you write, be it on privacy, or anything else. The staff and I are very much looking forward to another visit with you and to be able to listen and be educated by you. So let me know when it might be. With very best regards from house to house. Cordially yours,
Bruno Bettelheim
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO – ILLINOIS 60637 THE SONIA SHANKMAN ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL 1365 EAST SIXTIETH STREET The Rowley Professor of Education MIDWAY 3-4654 November 2, 1968 Dr. Rudolf Ekstein Reiss Davis Clinic 9760 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90035 Dear Rudi: I am very glad that Contemporary Psychology will print your reply. I am even happier about your appointment as a Full Clinical Professor.3 Congratulations! Best regards from house to house. As always,
Bruno Bettelheim
BB:mt
3. Ekstein became a Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO – ILLINOIS 60637 THE SONIA SHANKMAN ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL 1365 EAST SIXTIETH STREET The Rowley Professor of Education MIDWAY 3-4654
September 25, 1969 Dr. Rudolph Ekstein Reiss-Davis Child Study Center 9760 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90035 Dear Rudi: When I saw you in Rome, you did not tell met that you planned to deface the front page of the fall issue of your Bulletin with a picture of the least wanted person. What are you trying to do – establish a Rogue’s Gallery? I meant to write you to thank you for having sent me a copy of your new book4 in which you so kindly included a very small contribution by me. The reason I have not already written you about it is that I first wanted to finish reading it. Having only recently returned from my vacation, I have not yet found the time to do so. Now, before I have gotten around to thank you for this lovely volume, comes the latest issue for your Bulletin in which you honored me in a way that I never expected. It was a great surprise, for which I want to thank you very much. It really was awfully nice of you, and I am very grateful to you. What I cherish most are the remarks which reflect your friendship, which means a great deal more to me than all the rest. Please give my very best thanks also to Dr. Friedman5 who, with you, edited and so very kindly inscribed the copy you sent me. With the very best from house to house. As always, BB: ak
Bruno Bettelheim
4. Rudolf Ekstein & Rocco Motto, From Learning for Love to Love of Learning (New York, 1969). 5. Seymour Freidman, M.D. was a child psychoanalyst, a friend and collaborator of Ekstein’s.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE SONIA SHANKMAN ORTHOGENIC SCHOOL 1365 EAST SIXTIETH STREET CHICAGO – ILLINOIS 60637 The Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Education Midway 3-4604 April 25, 1974 Dr. Rudolph Ekstein Reiss-Davis Child Study Center 9760 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90035 Dear Rudi, How lovely of you to send me your new German book! Trude and I will cherish this book. I am so glad that you have the satisfaction that your wonderful work will now also be duly appreciated in the German world. Thank you also for having sent me the review of my book which appeared in the Los Angeles Times which I think was really a lovely piece. With the best from house to house. As always, Herzlichst!
Bruno
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING BRUNO BETTELHEIM 1 Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 (415) 851-2018
March 3, 1976 Dear Rudi, I wanted to write you to thank you for your IN SEARCH OF LOVE AND COMPETENCE, and the lovely inscription which Trude and I especially appreciated. It is a most impressive volume and I hope it will receive its well deserved success and bring you pleasure. Before I could write you, your lovely note from Chicago arrived. I am so glad you enjoy [sic] your visit at what used to be my old haunts. I hope you will not need to separate yourself from Reiss Davis as I had to separate myself from the OS. It is very hard to give up the work of one’s life time [sic], even if it becomes necessary as it has been in my case, and even if one knows it in good hands, as is also true for me. But having had to go through this separation, I wish that its agonies may be spared to you. Since I probably won’t be seeing you before you leave for Vienna, I envy you your good luck to be there, and during the very best months of the year. I am sure it will be a very rewarding experience and wish you to it [sic] the very best of luck and success. Vienna will be the richer for it, I am sure. With my best, as always, Herzlichst As ever, Bruno
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March 29, 1976 Dr. Bruno Bettelheim 1 Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno: I have your letter of March 3rd and hesitated to answer since I did not quite know what would be coming up here. But by now it is quite clear that some form of merger with Vista Del Mar will take place, and I have been told by the Board President (Dr. Motto6 has resigned and cannot really speak beyond June 31st when he ends his services) that to be sure the Bulletin of the Clinic cannot be continued “because of finances,” and that also the Psychosis Project must stop. What may be offered as opportunity to me or to others remains to be seen, but the Clinic as I have known it and the work as I have stimulated it during these last twenty years will not continue. I suspect we may be offered consultantships, or some part-time arrangement in order to save something of the old Reiss-Davis Clinic, or perhaps just to maintain the pretense of it. And we go through the kind of mourning that you know so well, and that’s really not too new for me either because I’ve gone through this a few times. It is not so much Reiss-Davis, the institution, that is of concern to me but obviously it is the work. I have been interested in these kinds of children and adolescents for some more than thirty years now, a kind of professional lifetime, and I cannot say like you that I leave it in good hands, but rather I will have to find some way to continue the work anyway. I could not complain ever about having too much support for it, but some insights came out of it. I imagine that Vienna will help me to think through what next. There are always all kinds of things to do and times to be filled and perhaps I might be able to hold some small group together and continue the work and perhaps even find some institutional home, but as of this moment things are finished. We have no more to do but to wind up and get used to the fact that Charity is not always charitable. Somebody once said, “Love is not enough.” Warm regards to you and Trude. Herzlichst, Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. RE:ms 6. Rocco L. Motto, M.D., Director of the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center, was an analytically oriented psychiatrist, administrator, and Ekstein’s co-author of his text on psychoanalysis and education.
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January 31, 1978 Dr. and Mrs. Bruno Bettelheim 1 Sierra Lane Portola Valley, Ca 94025 Dear Trude and dear Bruno: Ruth and I want to tell you – and of course Jeannie joins us in that – how pleased we were we could spend that evening together with you. It meant a great deal to me. If only there was more of this. I am sending on to you a couple of manuscripts of mine that I thought would be of interest to you. I mentioned them to Bruno. One has to do with Wittgenstein and Freud, the underlying parallels in both their thinking, and the other concerns the psychotherapy with an autistic child and the birth of the psychotherapeutic dialogue. In a few weeks we are off to Vienna and it will be wonderful to meet Fritz7 and Helen again. I wish you two could [sic] there too and we could make it a Viennese reunion in Vienna. Instead if this is impossible, I hope we can see you in Los Angeles or perhaps after our return we can plan a weekend together. With warm regards from house to house. Herzlichst, Rudi
7. Fritz Redl, Ph.D. was Distinguished Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Wayne State University and a specialist on the interface of education and mental health.
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October 6, 1978 Dr. and Mrs. Bruno Bettelheim 1 Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Trude and Dear Bruno, I thought it was time to give a sign of life and also to find out how you are. My wish to write you was reinforced suddenly through a funny experience on an airplane. I was traveling for a seminar to Oklahoma City. Sitting next to me a gentleman from the Orient, a Filipino who lives in New York and we exchanged but a few words when I helped him get the coffee, etc. When we were about to land he turned to me and asked: “Are you Dr. Bettelheim?” Of course, I was a bit flabbergasted and I said that I was a good friend of Dr. Bettelheim, but how did he come to think that I was Dr. Bettelheim? He told me that he had read Bruno’s studies in part and had heard him somewhere, perhaps on the radio, and I had exactly the same “Prussian” accent. Of course, I defended Bruno and me about that Prussian accent and explained our relationship. It was a lovely idea to be mixed up with Bruno in the midst of Oklahoma and by a man from the Philipines[sic]. And of course I felt you should know. I aspire now to the accomplishment that somebody will meet Bruno and ask him whether he was Dr. Ekstein. Our time in Europe was wonderful. I felt often in Vienna that I would want to stay there forever. But of course, these strong sentimental feelings did not keep me from coming back to the States. But most likely next April I will again be Guest Professor for a couple of months. So I have become a wanderer between 2 worlds, back and forth, as long as health and opportunity permits it. This time, Ruth, at the end of our stay in Vienna told me how much she wished at that moment to stay there a little longer. I cannot tell you how good I felt about it. Are you ever coming down to Los Angeles? Let’s try and have a good sentimental dinner together and enjoy the mistaken identities. Affectionately, Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. RE:kh License # PL 2378
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July 16, 1979 Bruno Bettelheim, Ph.D. 1 Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno, I was surprised and happy upon returning from Europe where I was again a guest professor in old Vienna, to find your book8 and your lovely note inside of it. I started to look at it, and of course realized that some of the material is known to me, but other articles are not and I very much look forward to becoming more acquainted with it. My time in Vienna this time, unlike those terrible years before 1938, was not a time of surviving, but rather one of reviving my spirits after all the tension and difficulties in the United States. I don’t know whether I ever had occasion to tell you about our daughter Jean’s difficulties with the school system. In one year she had to be in four schools. Finally, she ended up in Watts and the only alternative she had was to resign completely and give up her teaching career. But she did survive it and someone in the school system, seeing the injustice done to her, helped her transfer to an integrated school and life goes on. I will back into the school system as a consultant, and hopefully work with principals so that they may try to be leaders of teachers rather than administrators. During the end of our stay in Vienna Jeannie joined us for two weeks, and between the opera and Salzburg, and all my friends in Vienna, the seminars I gave in the Freud Gesellschaft, at the university, she got a view of life that revived in all of us the belief in western civilization. I wish I could tell you more about these exciting weeks there, the fiftieth anniversary of the Socialist International Youth Movement Meeting in 1929, a kind of geriatric reunion, May 1st at the Tribune, together with all the government members, without any protection facing the marching groups, more a pre-victory celebration for the coming election than the kind of demonstrations that I remember when we faced barbed wire on the Ringstrasse. I wish we could get together again and see you and Trude and talk about it all. You see how your beautiful volume surviving got me suddenly to move to the issue of reviving, and that’s what Europe meant for me and of course also means your book.
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The Viennese have not forgotten the holocaust and neither did the Germans. I was also in Frankfurt. There were wide discussions all over town, in the school system and in every family. And your book will contribute to keep that memory alive. Many of my friends in Vienna are survivors and they have remained vital people, vital friends. I was invited to come back for just a few days to give one address at the beginning of October. So was Fritz Redl. We are to address a group of UNESCO workers around the International Year of the Child. I accepted it and realized I have become a wanderer who goes back and forth between two cities. Thanks once more for your book. It will make the rounds. And warm regards to Trude and you. Affectionately, Rudi RE:kh
8. Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York,1979).
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Bruno Bettelheim ONE SIERRA LANE – PORTOLA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 94025 415-851-2018
October 4, 1983 Dear Rudi, Thank you very much for your wishes for my 80th birthday, which are very much appreciated, although I do not cherish being so old. My advice to you is to try to stay young as long as possible – old age creeps up on you all too soon! The reasons I am thanking you for your letter only today are complicated, to say the least. Yes, I tried to get away from having to pretend to enjoy having reached an age I do not enjoy by making what we both expect to be probably our last trip to Europe. Among the reasons for it was to visit some of our oldest and closest friends in London and Switzerland. London was most enjoyable, partly because of seeing some good plays and even more so through meeting Eric’s London friends who are a very nice bunch of interesting young people. Incidentally Eric finally got his wishes and found a position in London, working there in international law for an American firm, just what he wanted. We shall miss him very much, his being so far away, but it is very good that he got his wishes. Now it is up to him to make something good of it. Then we vacationed a week in Venice which also was very nice. Then we went to Switzerland and in Zurich Trude suffered a severe coronary insufficiency which required her hospitalization for nine days in intensive care. It was in part her will to live, and the extraordinary good care she received in the University hospital in Zurich, which helped her pull through. But it was quite a struggle. Then we had to fly her with an ambulance plane to Frankfurt and from there on a stretcher, accompanied by a physician and a nurse to Stanford hospital where she stayed a couple of days longer. But since medically not much can be done and all she needs is rest for her heart to recuperate she is now doing exactly that at home and we are satisfied that things are going as well as one can be expected. She is on a slow mend. Unfortunately she never will be really well again, this is simply not in the cards, but we are hopeful that we shall have still some time together, although it will have to be a restricted life, we are determined not to let it interfere with living as well as we can. So that is my story, and explanation why it took me so long to thank you for your letter. With my best to you and all of yours, as ever. Bruno
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November 2, 1983 Dr. Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno, Now it’s my turn to apologize for the late response to your October 4 letter. I understand, we have come to an age where the birthday congratulations have a different meaning from what it was in earlier times. It was so sad to hear how your European trip turned out to be such a painful struggle. It was good though to hear that Trude is on the mend, and one can only hope that the restrictions might be much less than expected. As you know, we often speak about you. Particularly our Jeannie who has chosen you as one of her real heroes. She uses fairy tales now in the schoolroom and starts to teach teachers how to use fairy tales and myth with elementary school children. You will recall some of her material from the panel we had together at UCLA. She also saw your letter to me and was sad. What can one do as one gets older but just go on with the work? And you have been an extraordinary model just for that. I wish I could try as hard as you. I want to end the letter on a happier note. Some two years ago a young student of mine in Vienna told me that her Salzburg professor suggested she write her dissertation about my life and work. Could she interview me, get reprints, correspondence, etc? I was quite willing but a little puzzled as to what a 22 or 24 year old Catholic girl from Salzburg would do with the life and work of a surviving Jewish Viennese, driven out, and returning as on older man. A few weeks ago I got the dissertation9 and I couldn’t believe how she, such a young woman, got into my head. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and when I compare that with my dissertation, I feel she did a hundred times better. It is a strange narcissistic pleasure, to read there a description of a face in history, woven around the person, the person being me. I wished my family (and secretary) could read that German thesis. What can one do but enjoy memory and reflection? My family joins me in sending best wishes and all very good feelings to Trude and you. Please, let’s keep in touch, even it is just for a few lines. As Always, Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. 9. Dorothea Oberlauter, Rudolf Ekstein. Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1985).
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Land – Portola Valley, California 94025 415-851-2018
August 15, 1984 Dear Rudi, I am thanking you only now for your paper on Die Begegnung… because when you sent it to me you were in Vienna, and I wanted to wait to write you until you are back, since I do not know your Vienna address. It is a lovely paper, as you well know. It is also full of nostalgia. You are really too young to be so nostalig [sic], you should leave this to much older people like me. Naturally as one gets old one becomes ever more nostalgic for one’s youth which then seems so far away, and distorted by a halo, because it was not all that good and pretty, but in many ways lousy. You speak about your Realschul teacher who meant so much to you. You do not mention all the anti-Semitic bastards you must also have had as teachers, as did I. Which takes me to your paper. What you say is all very well said, very pertinent and important. But what bothered me is what you did not say. Somehow in reading it, it seems hardly anything worth mentioning happened between your university days and now. Your Vienna sounds such a lovely place. But it is the city of Schoenerer and Lueger and Hitler. It embraced him with the greatest delight, including die Arbeiter. The Austrian SS was the most cruel of all. Not a word about the millions of Jews who were exterminated with the full approval of most Viennese. As a matter of fact it was in Vienna where I spontaneously heard loud expressions of regret that some, that all too many, escaped the gas chambers. I simply can not get this out of my mind. And I can not help wonder that you can give a speech in Vienna with nary a single word about it all. You write as if the tradition from Mach and Buehler [sic] would have remained unbroken, it just happened that you came to the US, it just happened. Of your teacher you say first “er ging unter” as if he would have drowned on a summer excursion. Only then you add that he wurde vernichtet, but not by whom, nor why. Well, I can not [sic] help my reactions and rather than simply tell you what an excellent paper it is as far as its positive content is concerned, I felt I should also tell you what I missed in it. Including that if they would have gotten hold of them, the lovely Viennese would have murdered with pleasure both Freud and Adler. And Charlotte Buehler[sic], and you and me. Well, you can love Vienna and forget and forgive. I am not just such a good Christian that I forgive them the murder of 6,000.000 Jews, for that I am much too much an old Jew.
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Still, it is good for you that you can enjoy it all so much. I hope you will have many more good years to be able to enjoy it all! As always, Bruno
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August 20, 1984 Dr. Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno, I was very moved by your letter. I appreciate both your love and your candor. Actually, I have not remained silent in Vienna about the past, but this was [because], as [on] many other occasions. I am known in Vienna as one from the underground movement, and they know that I had been in prison, and that I fought in our movement against the Fascists. But still, I did listen to you. My best friend from high school days, who lives now in Australia, was also in the youth movement with me, and escaped as did I, also wrote me some time ago. I had sent him the tape of an interview I gave for the Viennese radio, and he made the same point that you made. And I take both of you seriously, very seriously. But, you see, I have many friends there from the days of the underground, and I live in a Vienna, whenever I go there, that is a different Vienna again. I suppose you want to tell me that one may be willing to forgive, but that one should not forget, and one should not let them forget. The generation of students that I address now at the University, at the Hospital, at the different Austrian provincial towns, are people who were all born after 1945. Of course, they should learn too what has happened and I think most of them know. A young woman, a student in Salzburg, born about 1960, wrote her doctor’s dissertation about Rudolf Ekstein – Leben und Werk. I was deeply touched by her work. She had gone to the underground museum and found there my “illegal” article from a mimeographed paper, and she interviewed some of the political leaders who knew me from these days. She also read my books and papers, interviewed me, and I think you would see that she truly knew about me, in part through me. I felt very pleased about her dissertation, some 440 type written pages, much better than what I ever did for my doctor’s work, but was disturbed about one observation she made, although of course, I had told her. I just didn’t think she would hear me as well as she did. She wrote that when Ekstein came to America, he found a different climate, a different political situation that was at once for him a deep political involvement to give up. He could find nothing in the States that could replace the youth movement days. Well, I don’t know whether I am defensive or just reflecting, but in any case, I very much would want to see you and have a chance to talk about the old days and the new days. I live between two worlds and travel back and forth as long as health and age and opportunity permits.
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This year’s European trip I ended with participation in Argentina, a congress arranged by Filium (Arnaldo Rascovsky) about child murder and child abuse. It was a wonderful experience and I almost couldn’t believe it. I spoke as freely and openly there as in the old days before Fascism in Austria. There is new hope for Argentina, and I almost felt like my younger self. Enclosed you will find to [sic] other papers and I hope you enjoy them. I am grateful for you candor. Friendship is worthless without it. Herzlichst, As always, Rudi
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane –Portola Valley, California 94025 415-851-2018
August 31, 1984 Dear Rudi, Thank you very much for your letter and the two reprints you sent me with it. I appreciate very much the spirit of true friendship in which you wrote me. I have done a lot of thinking about the difference in our views, because what you think is important to me. I think I have come to some understanding of what is involved. One is certainly our age difference, and that you experienced Austro fascism in prison, and I Austro Nazism in and out of the concentration camps, and some of the leading Austrian socialists also in the camps and it was a very disgusting experience. Let me mention just two little vignettes: one: Kreiske10[sic] embracing Arafat to the delight of the Austrian socialists. The other a recent report from my son-in-law who is deeply involved in Judaism although not particularly religiously so. Out of interest he and our daughter Naomi who are now living in Vienna where he was posted by our government tried to attend a service in the temple in Vienna. They had to go through a police gauntlet, supposedly for their security, but from the remarks made by the police officers and how they treated them personally, although they made it clear that they are Americans, which were clearly designed to discourage them from ever again attending the temple, and made their anti-Semitism quite clear. You, moving in the circle of your friends and admirers, are not exposed to such experiences. Well, more to the point: I do not believe a reconciliation between Adler and Freud is possible, nor did any of the two ever think so. I believe that as far as Jung is concerned there is more of a possibility because, despite his mysticism, Jung believed in the inner chaos of man and that search for an understanding of this chaotic inner self is needed, as did Freud. Adler on the other hand stresses competition, will power, and the inferiority complex, etc. represents a belief in meliorism and essentially an optimistic approach which is contrary to Freud’s pessimism about man. Adler is thus indeed close to socialism which believes that is the contradiction within society rather than those in inner man which are the problem. I belief [sic] these two views are irreconcilable. Which takes me to Freud’s conviction that self knowledge, knowledge of the chaos and the aggressiveness and hostility in the unconscious, are what we most strive for. Now among German intellectuals I found efforts to come to some understanding of what it was not just in the generation of their parents, but also in them which made them embrace Nazism. In Austria I found none of it, only a determined denial that they ever were Nazis. I had observed too many
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good Viennese socialists adoring Hitler for my taste, and doing his dirty work with a vengeance. I can excuse them, or I could, if they now would search their souls, trying to understand how and why they did it. But I found none. Well, that’s their problem. I just wanted you to understand my position. The meliorism of Adler and of the socialists is to me a denial of the true nature of man by blaming it on society. But you like it in Vienna, and you certainly are entitled to do so. You have earned it well. So my intention is neither to criticize you nor to deter you. There are just too few pleasures in life to forego any of them. The Austrian government had invited me to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the peace treaty.11 It was a big occasion, and they mentioned that some of us whom they had invited had left Austria. You understand, left out of unknown reason. Hitlerism was never mentioned, nor anti-Semitism, nor the killing of Jews. It just never had happened as far as they were concerned, Kreiske [sic] et al. This left a very bitter taste in my mouth and some others who, like you, had once been in the underground. Well, that’s all past history. I am glad you enjoyed your stay in Argentina. Remember the Prague Spring and what happened to it? Well, I guess it’s my age and natural pessimism. Things are not going well with us. Trude is terribly ill and suffers a great deal, and age has taken its toll on me. But such is life, particularly in old age and sickness. So keep up your young spirit and enjoy life here or in Vienna as well as you can. Herzlichst, Bruno
10. Bruno Kreisky (1911-1990), the foremost Austrian politician of the post-war era, a Jewish Socialist, served as Chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983. 11. Presumably the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which ended the four-power occupation of Austria, restored Austria’s independence, and asserted its neutrality.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane – Portola Valley, California 94025 415-851-2018
Dear Rudi, Thanks very much for your kind words of sympathy with my bereavement which are very much appreciated. Trude suffered very much during the last few years with great courage, determined to live as long as she could. Alas it was much too short a time for me! Ours had been a good life I wish it could have been me to go first. It is a cruel blow and I don’t know how I’ll be able to manage but I’ll try, because this is what Trude would have wanted me to do. Only time can heal this deep wound. As ever
Bruno*
*This letter was handwritten in response to Ekstein’s condolences. The other letters were typed.
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Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane – Portola Valley, California 94025 415-851-2018 February 2, 1985 Dear Rudi, Thanks for your letter and for the papers you sent with it. Right now I am too distraught to do them justice, I am unable to concentrate sufficiently for that. As soon as I feel that I can do so, I plan to read them. As you might know, I thought most highly of Buhler who was examining me on my minor in psychology. I guess you do not know that in the end of October Trude died. She had been very ill and had suffered a great deal, which as always, she suffered with the greatest courage and without any complaints. The shock is still too great for me to be able to concentrate on anything else. Not even time will heal this wound, although the wound may eventually scar over to some degree. There is little else I can think of, or talk about. But since life goes on, whether or not one likes it to do so, I plan to go on as best I can, although it no longer makes any sense to me. With this about the issues you write me: Of course I am pleased that you agreed to participate in the meeting in April, and I look forward to seeing you then. As far as I know Ruth and her family return only on the day of the meeting from a short vacation in the Pacific. So I do not know whether anything can be worked out with her, and if so how and when. About the meeting planned by Dr. Marion Solomon, she called me and I said I would accept if something useful can be worked out. We shall see with what she comes up.
With my best to you and yours, as always,
Bruno
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March 27, 1985 Dr. Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno, First of all, thank you for your note of February 2. As you would know, I often think of you and surely I know what a painful time you go through. I’m just glad that in spite of all, you do not give in and you feel like I do when I am met with loss, and you go back to the work. Now, we here all look forward to your meeting with us in Los Angeles. I am happy that I was asked to discuss your contribution. I will try my best to do justice to it. Also, I have told the Gestalt Therapy Association that I would want to have the privilege to host a small reception for you in my home here. My wife and the children will help us and the Association will invite their main guests. If you think of anyone beyond your Ruth and her husband, please let me know so that they can be asked too to join with us. It will be so good to see you and you will see in my home the better things that we remember from our days in Vienna. A week later, Ruth and I will go to Europe again. I have been invited there to address a large meeting to remember the school reform of Otto Glockel,12 and I’m to speak about the influence of his ideas abroad. And I will take another letter that you wrote me to heart and speak out loudly, as loudly as I can about those of us who were driven out and brought some of the new thinking about education to our new country. It will be good to be with you. Warm regards as always. Herzlichst, Rudi RE:kj 12. Glockel was President of the Vienna Education Authority from 1918 on; in 1927, compulsory education was extended for ten to fourteen year old children.
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Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane – Portola Valley – California 94025 415-851-2018 June 11, 1985 Dear Rudi, Since I know you were in Vienna, I have myself time to read the two very interesting papers you so kindly sent me. As you can imagine, the one on Buhler brought back many old memories. I always thought very highly of him, and your paper, so many years after we knew him, bears out this my evaluation of the man. I don’t think it does Freud credit that he refused to meet him, when he came to Vienna and wanted to make his Auswartung. But these are by now very old stories. Both your papers are very good and interesting. delighted that you used some of her material.
I am sure Jeanie was
I more or less decided that I can’t live here by myself and will, or plan, eventually to move to Ruthie, a soon as they can build a small place for me to live with them on their grounds. But all this requires endless permits, planning, etc. so I don’t know when I’ll be able to move. I am very lonely all by myself here, and have no longer any Gusto to do anything. Still, I’ll try to go to Europe from the middle of July to the middle of September, trying to distract me, although I doubt that this will be possible. I also will spend some 10 days in Vienna with Naomi who is living there at the beginning of September, about from the first to the tenth. If this reaches you in time, and you are also there at this time, please let me know so that we can get together in Vienna. It would be quite an occasion. As always, Herzlichst Dein Bruno
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July 17, 1985 Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane Portola Valley, California 94025 Dear Bruno, Thank you for your June 11 letter which however reached me only after I returned from Vienna. How much I would have liked to meet you in Europe, even better in Vienna itself. Perhaps someday. I am delighted about the idea that eventually you will be moving to Ruthie, to a private place of your own, not alone and with your family. In turn, I allow myself the fantasy that we can do something together, not only reminiscences about old days, but perhaps write something together, do something together. Enclosed you will find a photocopy of Arbeiterzeitung about a book that has been written about my life. A young woman from Salzburg, her parents belonging to the other party, chose me to write her dissertation about, and it was turned into a book. It is like a fairy tale and someday when we meet again I will show you the book. I also enclose the analysis of a fairy tale, and I hope that when you will be in Vienna you will have had an opportunity to see the exhibition “Traum und Wirklichkeit”. I look forward then to a Wiedersehen, Herzlichst, Dein Rudi
RE:kh
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Bruno Bettelheim One Sierra Lane – Portola Valley, California 94025 415-851-2018 October 4, 1985 Dear Rudi, I just returned from two and a half months in Europe which explains why I am thanking you only today for your newest and, as always, excellent paper on Fairy tales and for letting me see the write up on your biography in the Arbeiter Zeitung. I hope it gives you pleasure to be so recognized in your old country. I know you are deeply attached to Vienna and Austria. My feelings are much more negative, but then I had my fill of the Austrian SS in the camps, where they were much worse than the Germans, and this says much. I, too, was in Vienna, but only for some two weeks, visiting Naomi who presently lives there. Different for you, nobody in Vienna knows or cares about me. So it was somewhat more satisfying to be in Germany, where I was also for about two weeks, and where I was treated very differently from Vienna. Among other things which were rather pleasant was that Klaus von Bismarck – descendent from Otto, his grandfather, made a special point in making some fuss over me, and where the German foreign minister spent an evening having dinner with me. So we are treated quite differently in the two German countries. But I am happy for you that you not only can but are enjoying Vienna. Life has too few pleasures to forego any. It was difficult for me to be on this trip, my first one without Trude. I really went on it to escape the depression into which her death has thrown me. I hope to see you on[sic] the meeting on Attachment. Until then, as always yours, Bruno
Chapter Five first appeared in Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2006, pp. 65124.
Six
In Memoriam: Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005)
What you have inherited from your fathers acquire it, to make it your own Goethe, 1808
For me, he was Dr. Ekstein. I was his analysand from early 1979 through April, l989. I recall with pleasure his expansive face, his Viennese accent, his Central European syntax, his slight bow when you first encountered him. I immediately experienced his charm. He radiated feeling, possessing a childlike quality and playfulness that I now associate with child analysts who are naturally comfortable in interacting with the young. Warm, spontaneous, compassionate, he embodied a special form of kindness. I was taken by his poise, his naturalness of being, and his exuberance. Along with an authentic joie de vivre, I sensed in him a profound passion for and commitment to doing psychoanalysis, to thinking psychoanalytically. From him I learned how to listen, how to construct and sustain the analytic situation, how to respect formal boundaries, gradually identifying with and valuing a broad spectrum of the analytic attitude and ethics. He began seeing me for a fee of $35.00 an hour, which was one half or one third of what most analysts charged in the community, despite his international reputation. This signaled to me that his self-regard did not turn on having a wealthy or celebrity clientele. During the second year of my analysis, when I lived in Tucson, Arizona, he accommodated my schedule, often seeing me late Friday afternoon, twice on Saturday, and again on Sunday. I recall a session in the mid 1980s. Ekstein had moved his practice to his home on Westgate Avenue. In order to get to the consultation room, one had to park on the street and walk down the driveway. During my hour there was an unforeseen rain storm. At the end of the hour, he noticed that I had not brought an umbrella. He immediately took out one of his own and escorted me back to the car. At the time, my analytic super-ego was working overtime; I wondered if he shouldn’t be doing this. I now see it as a precious gift, a spontaneous gesture of genuine humanity. In the early stage of the analysis, I wanted him to clarify his
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theoretical orientation. Without hesitation, he stated that he was a member of the Rudi Ekstein school of psychoanalysis. I initially found his answer evasive, glib, and self-referential. He was affirming that he could be himself in the analytic situation, not needing to ease his anxiety through membership in a dominant school or trendy theory, or reliance on an all-encompassing technique. He was prepared to think for himself, to think his own thoughts, not slavishly adhere to a single theory or dogma. If he didn’t have to conform and if he could speak in his own voice, so could I. My brother, who is a clinical psychologist in Northern California, attended a conference where Ekstein was delivering a plenary address. He decided to introduce himself after the talk. But he had an agenda, “to straighten him out about me.” After mentioning his name and connection to me, Ekstein said: “So, you’re the one,” totally disarming him with good humor. While I was serving as a candidate on a committee to organize a conference on the fortieth anniversary of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, Ekstein’s name came up as a potential speaker. Although the training analysts agreed that he was a knowledgeable person and a strong orator, he would not be permitted to speak because he was ”ungovernable.” When I took this up with him, we carefully explored my ambivalences about the individuals who made the remark and about the designation itself. Ekstein told me that they were correct about him. He belonged to the loyal opposition; he would neither parrot an official history nor adhere to an institutional line. Certainly, he would not serve as a public relations spokesman. He could always be counted upon to speak his own mind, to express a skeptical point of view, and to dissent. On a social occasion with several analysts who had graduated from the Institute, I engaged in a discussion of why so few members published their own work. Ekstein’s name was raised in this context. They dubbed his multiple speaking engagements and record of publications “narcissistic and exhibitionistic.” When I investigated my intense reactions to their perceptions, Ekstein again listened attentively. His intervention was slightly edgier, making me think it had great relevance to him. He did not fathom how those who voluntarily joined scientific associations could refuse to present their own clinical work, making alibis to legitimize their defensive blockages or intellectual laziness about conducting rigorous research; he questioned the seriousness of those who chose not to advance the discipline with scholarship. It made him think that this refusal to write was a travesty of the aspirations and ideals and practice of the founders of psychoanalysis, nullifying also the example of leading thinkers at the local institutes, who wished to keep the discipline fresh, in tune with contemporary clinical, social, and theoretical debates. On a number of occasions, Ekstein pointed out to me why he took n interest in serving on institute committees, had no taste for administration, no investment in rising to positions of power, either nationally or within the
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Institute, no fascination with the often obsessional and legalistic topics that preoccupied so much of the membership. He was particularly critical of those who anguished over by-laws. Ekstein belonged to both analytic institutes in Los Angeles affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association and, as far as I could discern, he disregarded the petty politics and squabbles that kept these institutes apart. Yet he was always ready to teach, to speak, to supervise, to analyse, and to participate in study groups; for those activities he was generous and enthusiastic. As I entered the terminal phase of the analysis, I reluctantly began to talk about ending. In an almost biblical manner, he mentioned that I would be alone in the desert for forty years, so what was the rush to end? He had a knack for picking up my anxiety, particularly as it emerged around the desire to move faster. He almost always counseled patience, the need to slow things down so as to further reflection, promoting a subtler and more complex understanding of issues that required elucidation. Ekstein also helped me to grasp the limits of available, reliable knowledge and to comprehend how far one could probe with a deeply regressed, vulnerable patient. He once quoted the Beatles’ song, Let It Be, to illustrate poignantly when it was preferable to refrain from deeper analysis to avoid re-traumatizing a patient. I once brought a photo to an analytic session. In a wintry scene, it showed me outdoors being held by my pretty, twenty-nine-year-old mother, as I was being brought home from the hospital after my birth. Here was an artifact documenting a key moment in my life. I thought that Ekstein would interpret something about her beauty, comment about how she was cradling me, or perhaps offer an insight about the eye contact between us. Never predictable and always surprising, he was impressed that my mother was wearing a fur coat. During a period that coincided with my seminar work on ego psychology, I severely lambasted a number of the leading thinkers and ideas of that school, many of whom were his teachers in Vienna. My head was full of French theoretical perspectives, particularly Lacan. I vehemently linked the concept of adaptation to the Americanization of psychoanalysis, to political accommodation to the existing status quo, to a mindless optimism that blunted the subversive edge of the psychoanalytic methodology. Ekstein, for his part, did not argue with me. He was silent for the whole hour. As it was concluding, he said: “Long live adaptation!” One time, shortly before I entered the consultation room, Ekstein’s secretary tactlessly mentioned that he had scheduled seventy-eight therapy hours that week. From the couch, I wondered how he justified such a level of patient contact; I told him that it was irresponsible and uncaring toward his patients. Furthermore, I reminded him that my father was a workaholic, that I was a workaholic, and now it appeared irrefutably that he, too, was one. He replied that I did not have to be identified with the bad parts of him. After having shown him a draft of a paper on the analytic
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understanding of fascism and anti-Semitism, specifically around a cohort of European analysts from the 1940’s, I wondered if he resonated to my argument about their ambivalence about their own Jewishness. He replied: “What can I say? Look at me: I married a shiksa!” There was one important encounter in the post-analytic context. I was upset by an article that appeared in Newsweek, bashing Bruno Bettelheim’s reputation. I asked Ekstein by phone if he had seen the piece on Bruno. He had read it. I had written a strongly polemical reply to be submitted by fax to the letters column. As a practical matter, I thought that it had more chance of being published if he co-signed it. I was open to his editorial revisions, including a total rewrite. I drove it over to his office. One hour later, the phone rang. Ekstein said, “It’s a very tough letter. I’ll sign.” If my impressionistic remarks suggest that Ekstein’s practice of psychoanalysis lacked coherence and a rigorous method, that would be mistaken. For him the royal road to understanding the unconscious was through explorations of the patient’s language. Rather than being primarily pleasure-seeking or object-seeking, human beings for him sought meaning throughout the life cycle. Ekstein demonstrated to me that language and speech were the key implements in the analyst’s armamentarium of tools; language was a vital mediator in tracking a patient’s associations, in interpreting, and in establishing affective resonance. Learning to recognize and to speak the language of one’s patients optimized the establishing of intimate connections with them. It then could be followed by the creation of an authentic dialogue where the joint exploration of meaning might unfold. Focusing on the patient’s language presupposed the uniqueness and specificity of the individual; once the patient felt listened to and heard, she might experience safety, trust, and the sense of being really cared for and understood. For Ekstein, language was not about empty speech games or semantics; it included the play of affects. One of his favorite expressions, “the paradise of free association,” spoke to a potentiality in both the analysand and analyst to create a space, allowing for the formation of two-way communicative pathways. It was not an imperative to adhere to a strict rule. He coined a lovely expression for the analytic situation, “an island of peace,” evoking a framework that permitted the gradual emergence of a private language. Ekstein had an exquisite command of metaphor, particularly unusual in someone whose first language was not English. Ultimately, his method consisted in constructing a dialogue in which both participants experienced a shared poetics of the unconscious. My pre-psychoanalytic training was in European intellectual and cultural history and in critical theory. I had imbibed an analytic style of demystification that used critical reason and historical consciousness to unmask contradictions in various cultural artifacts. My encounter with Ekstein was transformational in that it constituted my first sustained experience with someone who used the intellect as an instrument to connect with others, to build bridges to those with other languages; it privileged the use of feeling to
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enter into the heart and soul of the other, to grasp sensitively the conflicts and aspirations of fragile human beings. For him, reflection always went along with self-reflection, transference with countertransference, the healing of others with a process of self-healing. All competent therapy, he believed, ought to awaken or, more precisely, to reawaken curiosity about the inner world. Ekstein distinguished between those who learned out of a desire to be loved from those who achieved a more mature love of learning for its own sake. Ekstein’s life-history was emblematic of the politically divisive issue of lay analysis. Trained as a psychoanalytic pedagogue in Vienna where lay analysis was warmly embraced, in this country he found himself excluded from the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute because he was non-medical. To practice, he was required to take a Masters degree in Social Work at Boston University. During the period of his tenure at Menninger’s, he was the analyst of the lay analysts, many of whom went on to brilliant careers, but he was forbidden to analyze medical candidates because he was not certified as a training analyst by the American. After moving to Los Angeles, Ekstein’s appointment as a training analyst was delayed for a number of years; he was frustrated and irritated at being evaluated by committees of analysts who did not have his level of clinical experience, to say nothing of his intellectual accomplishments and publication record. But he persevered, like the mythic figure of Sisyphus with whom he felt a special affinity. Ekstein deeply identified with lay analysis, wishing to see psychoanalysis broadened to include the training of all qualified candidates regardless of academic or clinical pedigree. It was the quality of the individual that mattered to him, not the résumé. He would often list those lay analysts who had enriched and enlivened the field, including Siegfried Bernfeld, Anna Freud, Erik H. Erikson, Theodor Reik, and Bruno Bettelheim. Despite the years of marginalization, of non-recognition, of negotiating obstacles, Ekstein did not seem bitter or resentful about official psychoanalysis. As he once put it, “I was half in, half out.” His struggles enabled him to think oppositionally, to go it alone when necessary, and to preserve his independence and his own distinct voice. Here is his account of a typical encounter with medical orthodoxy: Martin Grotjahn was here in Los Angeles. He was not an easy man. He was against lay analysts so when I met him in Los Angeles, he said to me, ‘As you know, I am against lay analysis but with you I make an exception.’ Now, of course, I have an Austrian mouth so I said, ‘You know I am against medical psychoanalysis, but with you I make an exception!’ Grotjahn replied, ‘We accept you, but one or two like you is enough.’
This amusing exchange underlines the ambiguity of exceptionalism.
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When I heard him speak publicly, particularly in his last years, I sometimes found his discourse on Freud’s Vienna a bit sentimental, sometimes bordering on kitsch. There was, however, an important point embedded in his reminiscences, namely his desire for psychoanalysts to be aware of their own history. This endeavor was consistent with his favorite quotation from Goethe, Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen (What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it, to make it your own), which speaks of the need to preserve and identify with the legacy of one’s mothers and fathers so as to have an anchor for one’s own work and intellectual growth. Having a historical consciousness about psychoanalysis, he was convinced that understanding the history of psychoanalysis psychoanalytically would deepen contemporary psychoanalysis’s awareness of itself and keep alive its emancipatory potential. Ekstein’s professional identity synthesized three formative influences from the 1930s: the militant Socialism that led him to become a member of the anti-fascist resistance; his training in philosophy under Moritz Schlick, from whom he learned how to philosophize and think his own thoughts; and his immersion in the clinical and theoretical perspectives of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where he learned to explore the world of individual subjectivity. The catalyst of his move from ethical Socialism to psychoanalysis, from Marx to Freud as it were, came through the reading of a marvelous 1925 essay by Siegfreid Bernfeld, Sisyphus, or the Limits of Education. Bernfeld’s electrifying attempt to merge Socialist and psychoanalytic perspectives remained an inspiration for him; it infused his wish not to be immured in the ivory tower of clinical practice, but rather to reach out to the community, to parents, educators, and mental health practitioners. Ekstein was committed to the possibilities of education, provided its practice could be based not on the theoretical foundations of idealism but on a depth psychology that grasped the dialectics of teaching and learning. Classical psychoanalysts conventionally refer to the caring behavior of an analyst as “a piece of decency.” But when I think of Dr. Ekstein, I think not of a piece, but of a fully decent man; he had what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “a fundamental sense of decency.” He stood up against injustice, against those who were indecent. For me, his lasting legacy is one of decency coupled with courage, confidence, and knowledge. Knowledge of psychic structure, of developmental patterns, of the psychosexual, of the life cycle, of the dynamics of psychopathology, of healing, of metaphor, and of how to facilitate the movement of a relationship from monologue to dialogue. There are no Eksteinians. Who, after all, could possibly imitate him? But though he wanted no disciples, I am hopeful that much of his work will endure and confident that those whose lives he touched will continue to cherish his memory. By following, to the best of our ability, his example, perhaps we can seek to emulate his decency and even aspire to belong to our own schools of psychoanalysis.
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RUDOLF EKSTEIN: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Ekstein, Rudolf, and Robert S. Wallerstein. 1958. The Teaching and Learning of Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1966. Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse: Clinical Studies on the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Severely Disturbed Children. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Ekstein, Rudolf, and Rocco Motto. 1969. From Learning for Love to the Love of Learning. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1971. The Challenge: Despair and Hope in the Conquest of Inner Space: Further Studies of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Severely Disturbed Children. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1972. In Quest of the Professional Self. In The Language of Psychotherapy. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamin Publishing Co., 1989, pp. 197215. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1974. Speaking of the Truth Behind Fairy Tales. New York: McGraw Hill. Also as audiocassette. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1976. In Search of Love and Competence. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1980. Clinical Use of Dreams. Ego Psychology Training Workshops. Laguna Beach: Ego Psychology Training Workshops. Audiocassette. Ekstein, Rudolf. 1989. The Language of Psychotherapy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Wilson, Samuel. 1990. An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin (Spring), pp. 15-30. Hunter, Virginia, ed. 1994. Psychoanalysts Talk. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 261-297. Benveniste, Daniel, 1998. A Bridge between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue with Rudolf Ekstein. The Psychoanalytic Review, 85:675-696.
Chapter Six appeared in American Imago, Vol. 62, No. 2, Summer 2005, pp. 225-233.
Seven
A Final Conversation With Bruno Bettelheim
He [the author] wondered all the time whether man can endure so much without committing suicide or going insane. Bruno Bettelheim, 1943
Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide on March 13, 1990. He left behind a distinguished and original body of work, consisting of seventeen books and copious other writings. He was one of the world's foremost psychoanalytic humanists. The transcript of this conversation with Bettelheim is taken from two discussions I had with him, the first on July 27, 1988, and the second on November 28, 1988. They took place at his apartment overlooking the Santa Monica Palisades and the Pacific Ocean. He was living there alone, cared for by a housekeeper. Bettelheim requested that I not publish the interview until after his death due to the confidential nature of some of the material, particularly the section on suicide. The text covers a good deal of ground, including his ideas on old age, his children, Los Angeles, the concentration camps, suicide, his experience in the 1930’s around the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, his reflections on lay analysis, Freud, his memories of his analysis with Richard Sterba, and the treatment of severely disturbed children. I have selected and edited the material to allow Bettelheim to speak in his own voice. A poignancy and sadness pervade the text; it is as if Bettelheim was continually wrestling with the idea of suicide and of ways to defend against taking his life. Here is the late Bettelheim summing up and reflecting on the themes that mattered most to him. It may be his last in-depth interview. D.J.F. Let me begin with a question taken from Simone de Beauvoir's book Old Age (1972). She says old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization, and she advocates a more generous old age policy, including higher pensions for the elderly, decent housing, medical care, and organized leisure. Tell me your particular thoughts about old age.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Don’t reach it! I think that what de Beauvoir suggests is perfectly reasonable. Although, in my opinion, these do not go to the heart of the matter, at least not from my perspective. What I have experienced is a deterioration of physical strength and energy, which I find very hard to take. It is depressing. I see no compensation for it, unless one wishes or desires to see one’s grandchildren grow up because I am curious about them. I know that I am too old to see them grow up, so I will not know what they are going to do. I wish them well, naturally. But what will happen to them in the future is not going to be of interest to me. My children no longer need me. I feel that I have done my life’s work, and I am fairly satisfied with it. But I feel a weakness that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to go on in ways in which I was accustomed to go on. And that is the great narcissistic hurt which I find very difficult to cope with. It’s nothing unusual or unexpected. It’s nothing that doesn’t come with the course of old age, but I don’t like it. What I fear, of course, is what everybody my age fears. What happens to some of my age mates is that they become completely incapacitated and live in such a state for a number of years, then they invest in nursing homes from which the best subsequently die.
D.J.F. There have been significant personal changes in your life recently, including the death of a spouse, a move to Los Angeles, a minor stroke, difficulties in swallowing, anxieties about an incapacitating illness, and fears of death. B.B. No, not fear of death. Only of a painful death. Fear of a prolonged death. What I really wish for is a fast and easy death. That’s easy to wish for. D.J.F. You are now a man in your mid-eighties and, if you will permit me, I would like to ask an Eriksonian question about your experience of the life cycle. Are you experiencing the conflict between despair and selfdefeat versus integrity or the acceptance of one’s life? B.B.
Let me put it this way: This is only referring to ideal types. He doesn’t give any indication at all of the statistical frequency of this ideal. It’s very easy to pull ideal types out of one’s own head without really checking the frequency or infrequency of the case. For example, he starts with basic trust and basic distrust. Although these are very good categories, how many children or infants really experience basic trust?
D.J.F. Or degrees of basic trust? B.B.
That’s right. Actually, what we are talking about, at best, are degrees. And degrees are frequently statistical concepts.
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D.J.F. Let’s talk personally. He’s really thinking of overcoming disgust, misanthropy, chronic contemptuous displeasure with life, and achieving what philosophers used to call wisdom and what psychoanalysts call integrity. Does that tally with your own experience? Forget about statistics for a second. B.B.
I had lunch today, before you came, with two prominent members of the faculty of the University of California. They were both highly intelligent and accomplished people, as prominent as they each can become in their profession. The conversation was often uninteresting, but a couple of years ago, I would have found it extremely stimulating. Today, I thought the conversation could have been stimulating, only I was really physically too tired to fancy it. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, not that I didn’t find it interesting, but it revolved around the subject of who was going to be the new chairman of psychiatry. Quite frankly, whoever that might be no longer interests me, whereas ten years ago, that would have been of great interest to me. This is because I have a realistic assessment of how much time I have, which isn’t very much.
D.J.F. What does interest you? B.B.
As one grows older, the areas of interest shrink, at least in my case this is so. Now, of course, there are some people who have been able to retain that ability to be creative and hold interests. When I compare today to four years ago during the national elections, I was very interested in seeing one of the candidates win. Today, this topic really doesn’t interest me.
D.J.F. Are you alluding to a physical sense of exhaustion? B.B.
It’s very hard to say. It is a deterioration of interests in life. To be very personal, I have essentially two interests in life. One is to see my younger daughter who is pregnant give birth, and the other is to try to finish another book of mine on ethics. I hope to finish at least the introduction to this book. So, you see, when one is young, one desires many things for the future. But when one becomes as old as I am, one desires only to finish a few things.
D.J.F. I want to get your general impressions and perceptions of Los Angeles. B.B. I never wanted to live here. My other daughter used to live in Pasadena, so I visited from time to time. I am going to make a very quick, prejudicial statement. I saw changes in my own daughter from the girl she was in Chicago to the woman she became once she made her home in Los Angeles, which in terms of my values, was an undesirable one.
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Now, I cannot blame it on the city. It might be her personally. It might be what drove her to move here. I cannot sort it out. I’m much too close to her. There is a concern with possessions which I consider external. But I would have liked to see her develop other qualities that might not have developed in any degree. There were many misgivings about Los Angeles despite being warned by my other two children. I moved here because she invited me, and I had no other opportunities. It was by no means my first choice. I explored other possibilities; each one had its problems. Here, at least, I had a daughter. I was hopeful for a good relationship, but it didn’t turn out the way I hoped for. And I guess it didn’t turn out the way she hoped for. This is hardly surprising or new. I wish her well. When she was a child in Chicago, we had so many common interests together; she had many values in common with me, and now the opposite was true. Now, wasn’t I developed then, wasn’t she developed then, or was it the city?
D.J.F. You’ve mentioned to me in previous conversations that you find a sense of superficiality in Los Angeles, a materialism, leading frequently to a trivialization of culture, to a sense of bad values, to a flamboyance and narcissism of everyday life here. B.B.
Let me put it this way. I know about the concentration of the entertainment world. Its importance in society here seems to be very different than in other places.
D.J.F. What are your impressions of the influence of money and of the trendiness of the Hollywood industry on the psychoanalytic community in Los Angeles? B.B. I really don’t think that I know enough about the analytic community in Los Angeles to give you a judgment about them. D.J.F. You can give me an impressionistic judgment. B.B.
There are many analysts in the Los Angeles area. Some who are very respectable, some who are very serious about it. Let's face it, there are some who are in it for the money and the prestige. I don’t think it’s any different from anywhere else. We are talking about degrees, and for that, we need to study it statistically, which I haven’t done.
D.J.F. Can a European intellectual like yourself ever “assimilate” into the United States? Have you become “Americanized”? B.B.
I can answer that in an uncomplicated way. When I retired from the University of Chicago, my wife and I very seriously considered retiring
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in Switzerland, Southern Switzerland. Finally, we decided we have three children who live in the United States. We didn’t want to be very far away from our children. Within a few years of reaching our decision, two of our three children went to live in Europe. D.J.F. Your American children have become Europeanized. B.B. Certainly one of them, very much so. Very much becoming Anglophiles. D.J.F. Do you think of yourself as American, or do you still regard yourself as primarily a European, a European intellectual, or someone who bridges both cultures? B.B.
As an analyst, you know the amazing background of so many of us from Europe.
D.J.F. I want to turn to Buchenwald and Dachau and the concentration camp experience. We were talking about Primo Levi’s sense of the poignant burden of the survivors. He says that the experience of the concentration camps cannot be understood historically or psychologically by those who did not live it, that it is impossible to convey that experience. There is a paradox for the survivors of the camps, that is, the need to make that incomprehensible experience remembered. Can you comment on that? B.B.
It’s an experience that is so overwhelming, so full of contradictions really that it’s very hard to cope with. I think that anybody who spent time in a German concentration camp it does not necessarily have to be an extermination camp never gets rid of the feeling of guilt and shame. It is such a degrading experience that you feel obliged not to suffer it, but to fight back your guilt. You have to suppress your normal reactions in a life-threatening situation. The problem is that you feel no one really understands what you went through. Some people repress it, some try to go on with life as usual as if nothing had ever happened. That’s a very empty way to deal with it.
D.J.F. Can you make it a little more specific? Do you agree with Primo Levi who says that the drowned and the saved are the same? He points out a degree of rage and shame among the Holocaust survivors. He insists on the need not to sentimentalize or idealize the past. In talking about this question, you mention that very revealing story of your cousin in Dachau. Would you talk about him again? B.B. He was already in Dachau when I arrived there. He gave me some good advice. The advice is whenever you have a chance to sleep, sleep;
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING whenever you have a chance to eat, eat. I found this to be very good advice because some of the prisoners, particularly Jewish prisoners, were very spoiled; they couldn’t eat the kind of junk they presented us with. If you didn’t eat it, you lost all power to survive. You had to force yourself to eat this junk in order to survive. You also needed only short sleep, so whenever you had ten or fifteen minutes to rest, you tried to sleep. Now the interesting thing are the dreams. In the concentration camp, I rarely dreamt about imprisonment or captivity. I dreamt of happy occasions, about...
D.J.F. Wish-fulfilling dreams? B.B.
Yes, and they were very helpful. On the other hand, when you were liberated, you dreamt that you didn’t get out. These were anxiety dreams. So the interesting thing was that in the camp, you didn’t have these anxiety dreams because you wouldn’t be able to cope.
D.J.F. You had enough realistic anxiety. B.B.
That’s right.
D.J.F. Now tell the story - I know this is painful - of the lineup and when your cousin was assaulted. B.B.
As for my cousin, he wasn’t assaulted; he just collapsed. He became unconscious and fell down. And then he was, of course, kicked by the S.S. and so on, and I couldn’t come to his rescue.
D.J.F. No one could have come to his rescue. B.B.
One has to restrain oneself from doing what is so tempting to do. It is a very difficult experience. Very shameful. It goes with the feeling that so many people who were as good as you, maybe better, were murdered. It gives rise to deep feelings of guilt and shame.
D.J.F. To have helped him out would have put your own life in jeopardy. B.B. That’s right. Very much so. Without really helping him. D.J.F. And that particular episode comes back as an example of the ambiguity of the morality in the camps? B.B.
Yes, well, in order to survive in the camps, you needed to be a good comrade because you always needed someone to help you. People wouldn’t help you unless you had done the same. There is one experience which becomes very troublesome for me the “Muslims.”
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They were the living corpses, unable to act on their own behalf; they all died very soon. What I've seen in some of the old age nursing homes is so much like the camps, the same psychological conditions. D.J.F. Let me ask you about your views on the chapter in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved called “The Intellectual in Auschwitz.” It’s basically about the philosopher Jean Amery. Levi talks about the morality of returning the blow, how the concentration camp experience pushed an individual to the limits of the spirit, into the realm of the unimaginable. We know that Levi himself had an inability to trade punches, to respond to violence with violent forms of self-defense. Is that a particular legacy of the intellectual who survived the camps, or is that something that is universal? B.B.
Yes, I would like to talk about the intellectual. The important thing was that you demonstrated to yourself that your mind was still working. It meant a great deal, it provided some self-reassurance, and it allowed one to hold onto certain ideas and to certain hopes. The main thing was not to lose hope.
D.J.F. Would an intellectual have a different kind of relationship to the issue of hope than a nonintellectual? B.B.
That is hard to say. I had to act so if I wanted to survive. Although I knew the odds against it were very high. But if you adopted hope that you would survive, you wouldn’t suffer all the regulations. You could finish your life. It was very easy all you had to do was run into the electric wire.
D.J.F. Was the cultivated man worse off than the uncultivated man? Did the man of culture have a deeper sense of humiliation, destitution, and lost dignity? B.B.
That’s a hard one to answer because I cannot jump out of my skin. I can only talk from my own experience. I don’t really know how the uneducated person took it. I had very little contact with the uneducated person because one tried to remain within one’s circle. I can tell you what the old prisoners told us when we arrived in Dachau. They said, if you survive the first months, you have a good chance to survive the first year; if you survive the first year, you have a good chance to survive the whole time. There were certain adjustments which had to be made practically immediately. One was that we had to accept the degradation without being in a continuous state of fury, which would drain you of all mental energy. So, I was observing Dachau, while being in Dachau. It was as if we technically were separated from the
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING experience in Dachau. Sometimes you acted as though you were observing a stranger rather than yourself.
D.J.F. You had to live a kind of split-off existence? B .B. That’s right, a split in the ego. D.J.F. Primo Levi talks about the memory that he had in the camp of verses by Dante, which had great value, which reestablished his link with the past, which saved culture from oblivion and reinforced his identity. You mentioned a memory of Fidelio. How important were those episodes or events, and how did that allow you to distinguish yourself from the “Muslim,” a metaphor for the worn-out man with the dead a\or dying intellect. B.B.
One had to hold onto whatever had given meaning to one’s previous life, even if it was nonsensical in the camp situation. You had to hold onto it to survive. One becomes afraid when one stops thinking and feeling; one wanted to reassure oneself that one hasn’t given up.
D.J.F. And your memory of that Fidelio? B.B.
It was a Sunday afternoon when one of the officers, a camp commander, piped in some area music. Suddenly, there was a Fidelio, which was an overture. A blast of trumpets which marks the liberation; I felt strongly that it was the voice of freedom from Buchenwald.
D.J.F. Not the meaning they wanted the music to have, but clearly that’s the power it had for you on a personal level. I want to get your speculations on the burden and the shame the survivors of concentration camps have, specifically, the potentiality of suicide. I’m thinking again of Primo Levi and of his apparent suicide. And I’m wondering about the existential and psychological proximity to death that survivors of the camps have as a legacy. B.B.
I don’t want to reflect theoretically. The experience in the camp plays havoc with the ego because the ego can no longer protect one. One’s ego becomes deficient. To every sensitive person, there was a very serious weakening of the ego, or, shall we say, it becomes difficult to contain the death drive. One no longer trusted the ego to be able to function.
D.J.F.
Why would that experience continue to have, especially amongst people who have written about it, who have borne witness, and who
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have attempted to perpetuate a memory of it, such power even after thirty or forty years of working it through? B.B.
That’s right. After all, to write about it, to think about it, is to remember it. One remembers how deficient one’s ego was; it is a painful and disturbing experience to study and remember this. I am re-experiencing this now as I read about the fantasies of the Free Corps, for an essay I am preparing for The Times Literary Supplement. My point is that when one was in this experience with so many murderous fantasies, somehow or another the death drive was so overwhelmingly hostile. It was a destructive experience.
D.J.F. Even as a victim? B.B.
That’s right. Even as a victim. Studying it causes one to be exposed and to see how overwhelming the death drive is and how weak the defenses are against it.
D.J.F. To the extent that it could lead to suicidal inclination? B.B.
That’s right. That’s right.
D.J.F. I want you to speculate on the burden and the shame of the survivors of the camps, and in particular, the inclination to commit suicide. Is there an inevitable loss of a defense against death? B.B.
This is always a very personal thing: the propensity to think of suicide in a realistic sense. In the past, I had something very important to live for. But now, with age, particularly since the loss of my wife, there is this wish or the idea of suicide. I don’t want to publicize it.
D.J.F. You have written about the limits of the psychoanalytic perspective in an extreme environment, one of physical, mental, and material deprivation. Yet, you have also talked about, in The Informed Heart, the strength of psychoanalysis as an instrument of understanding, even in impossible situations. Do you still hold to that? B.B.
Yes, the explanatory value of psychoanalysis is beyond question, always. Other aspects of psychoanalysis, the introspection, the selfcriticism, are not very useful in an extreme situation. The explanatory value is always there.
D.J.F. I want to turn now to your psychoanalytic training and to ask you how you first came to psychoanalysis.
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B.B. [laughs] Well, it was a Sunday in the Viennese woods. I belonged to an organization, the Jung Wandervogel. It was based on the tradition of the old German youth movement, but it was no longer as nationalistic as the original youth movement had been. It was very much antiwar, pacifistic, and leftist. Anyway, we met in the morning and went to the Viennese woods for a day of talk and play. On this particular Sunday, a young man, Otto Fenichel, dressed in military uniform, joined me and the person I considered my girlfriend. They started to talk about dreams and dream interpretation and the sexual meaning of dreams and all that. He was fully immersed in it all because he attended the University of Vienna the last time Freud lectured there, which would become The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1917 or 1918. As he talked about it, my girlfriend became fascinated not that I was fascinated, but, I didn’t want my girlfriend to become attracted to this man. As the day went on, I became more and more furious; later, we separated and I had a sleepless night. I decided that if this soldier on leave to finish his medical studies at the University of Vienna could talk about psychoanalysis, so could I. The next morning I had to go to school. As soon as school let out, I went to the one bookstore in Vienna that sold psychoanalytic literature and also published it. That was Deuticke. I bought all the psychoanalytic literature that I could buy. This included The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and some articles and journals, and I started to read it. I became more and more fascinated by it. But the origin of it was my anger at Otto Fenichel who had so impressed my girlfriend. The next Sunday, when we met again, I started to talk about psychoanalysis. At that time my girlfriend said, well that’s enough for one Sunday, let’s talk about something else, let’s talk about us. It was a great relief to me, but anyway, I got hooked. Since then I have been reading psychoanalytic articles and everything Freud had written. D.J.F. It’s a charming story. I want to ask you about your earliest memories of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. I know it was like a second family to you. B.B.
I don’t really have any memories of this Society, but rather of those who attended it. Because, you see, I was not yet a member. I was very friendly with Wilhelm Reich and, I’ve already mentioned Fenichel, who also became a good friend, and others. I got reports of what happened.
D.J.F. Let me ask you about the period when you were a candidate and your memories about how the candidates were treated: were they infantilized, were they nurtured, were they treated as loyal apprentices?
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What was the general climate there in terms of the general training period? B.B.
I can only speak from my own experience. It was a very friendly and encouraging experience because I was interviewed, as all candidates at the time were, by Anna Freud and [Paul] Federn. I forgot who the third interviewer was; there were three. And when I was interviewed with Anna Freud, her father entered the room and she introduced me to him, to which he replied, “A Bettelheim does not need any introduction to me!” He had, as a student, frequently come to the house of my grandfather, and he became friendly with an uncle of mine who shared military service with him. He knew the family. And then he asked about my background. I told him I studied art history, literature, and philosophy. Freud said. “that’s exactly the kind of person we need in this Society to counterbalance the dominance of the medical people who do not have broad culture and interests.” So that was very encouraging to me; everyone was very encouraging to me.
D.J.F. Do you have memories of whether there was toleration in Vienna for critical debates where there could be challenges to orthodoxy, and was research and independent kind of thinking promoted? B .B. I know that Freud permitted deviation. D.J.F. Tell me about it. B.B.
Freud was a very skeptical man who could be very kind, but who could also be very cutting because he did not suffer fools easily. I can tell you one thing that happened. It was described to me by Willie Reich, who at that time was one of the leading members of the Viennese School. During a discussion held at the Society, someone suggested that it might be of benefit for all of humankind if all leading statesmen would be analyzed. There was a lively debate. Freud didn’t talk much then; he was sick. Finally, they turned to him. He said he was pleased that his students had such a high opinion of psychoanalysis. He stopped for a while and looked around the room. And he said, “when I look around this room and think that all of you were analyzed, I cannot help but be skeptical.” This was typical.
D.J.F. There was an atmosphere that was pervaded with Freud’s skepticism. But that did not get in the way of certain forms of research and of critical thinking as long as one did not deviate too far from Freud’s own theoretical model?
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING I don’t know. I always had the suspicion that Freud would never have accepted child psychoanalysis if it had not been started by his daughter. You know, obviously with children, you can’t put them on the couch and just analyze them. You have to play with them and be active, something that Freud didn’t think was very appropriate for analysis. There were personal reasons that he permitted deviations from the classical model.
D.J.F. I’m curious to know what your own perception was of lay analysis in Vienna. Your story of Freud is revealing, but I want to know if there was a particular kind of receptiveness to it. Was there a camaraderie amongst the lay analysts? B.B.
Yes, there was a camaraderie between all of us. It was a beleaguered group that had to stick together and support each other. I think that the question of lay analysis was not a strong issue because there were many lay analysts, and I just told you how Freud responded to my training.
D.J.F. Was there a hierarchy amongst the lay analysts? For example, was Ernst Kris always regarded as someone of exceptional or special status? B.B.
No, no. I think there was [Theodor] Reik who was very close to Freud. Kris was relatively important because he married Marianne, the daughter of Dr. [Oskar] Rie who was a pediatrician in the Freud family and a close friend of Freud’s. [August] Aichhorn was also one of the leading lay people and nobody questioned it.
D.J.F. Another question about Freud’s role in Vienna and the period when you were there. Was Freud someone who played the role of a powerful and germinating father, or was he someone who curtailed creativity? B.B. He encouraged creativity if it didn’t challenge his theories. He liked it if one of his students or members of the Society anticipated things he later said; however, he always needed to discover things on his own. D.J.F. In other words, it was dangerous to be a little too innovative or original. B.B. Not dangerous, but one met with criticism. D.J.F. You’ve told me privately that Richard Sterba was your training analyst. Do you have some specific memories about the analysis? Beginning with the length of time, how a didactic analysis was distinguished from a therapeutic analysis in those days?
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During the therapeutic analysis, one was not supposed to read psychoanalytic writings. One might have read them before. In the didactic analysis, one was encouraged to read.
D.J.F. Do you recall whether or not your training analyst reported on you as a candidate? Or did they maintain confidentiality? B.B.
I had just started the training analysis before the Nazis marched in.
D.J.F. So it really was never finished. Tell me what memories you have of the analysis with Sterba. B.B.
They are only isolated bits, fragments of memory.
D.J.F. He is still alive; he is ninety now. B.B.
He’s in bad shape. I remember one day, there were binoculars on his desk, and I asked him, What are the binoculars doing here? He said that there was a beautiful young lady living across the street, and I like to watch her. And then he added, "Don’t you do the same?"
D.J.F. And that made an impression on you. B.B. Yes, that he had the freedom to permit himself to do this and he openly admitted it. D.J.F. I know the Beethoven volume that Richard Sterba wrote, but I knew that he was not Jewish. Was that an important feature of your analysis? B.B. It played a part in my selecting him because I had grown up with all the contemporaries, Edith Buxbaum, Wilhelm Reich, and Annie Reich; I had grown up with them. It was difficult to find someone who I did not know well and someone who could be impartial; so I came to Richard. D.J.F. Was that a problem in terms of the degree to which your identity, your ego, your sense of self was bound up with being a Viennese Jew? B.B.
No, not at all. It was very clear that Richard was very friendly with many Jews, and there was no inclination of anti-Semitism among Richard and Editha, his wife. Both were gentiles, Catholics. It didn't come up at all.
D.J.F. You’ve mentioned a number of times that Wilhelm Reich was your friend; you call him Willie. You’ve often commented on his originality and creativity, especially in the period from the twenties into the early
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING thirties until about 1933, the period of Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. What were the features of Reich’s psychoanalytic mind that made him a very crucial figure in the history of psychoanalysis?
B.B.
What impressed me most was his vitality. He was full of spirit. He got excited about things, and he was a very vital guy.
D.J.F. And the people around him also were vitalized by him? B.B.
Yes.
D.J.F. Tell me of your own views of the impact of Anna Freud on the Vienna group in the early and mid-1930s, after Reich was excluded. Was it known that she had been analyzed by her father? B.B.
It was known, but it was kept a secret. Although it was known, it was very much kept a secret that she was analyzed by her father. But, on the other hand, in those early days, children of analysts were often analyzed by their parents; it was not that uncommon.
D.J.F. And her impact? Did she grow in stature when Reich was excluded? And as she began to move toward the publication of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense? B.B.
The trouble is, I don’t think The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense could have been written if Reich had not published his Character Analysis before. Although it has never been acknowledged.
D.J.F. Do you feel that in some way it is her answer, her more moderate version, of Character Analysis? B.B.
No, it’s not a moderate version, but the whole idea of the analysis of resistance in her book were alleys opened up by the seminars where Willie Reich talked and where she was a student.
D.J.F. The clinical seminars? B.B.
That’s right.
D.J.F. What is your own sense of the comparisons and contrasts of the status of lay analysts in Vienna, and then the period you spent in Chicago? B.B.
As I told you, my training was interrupted very early at the beginning by the invasion of Austria by Hitler. When I came to Chicago, I talked
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to [Franz] Alexander, who was Director of the Institute, about my background and so on. He said, “You just ought to become a member of our Chicago society; you know more than our candidates know.” D.J.F. The candidates or the faculty? B.B.
I know. I meant the faculty. He did the same with Gerhard Piers who also did not complete his analysis in Vienna.
D.J.F. In Vienna, how many years of seminars did you finish? Did you have formal seminar training as well? B .B. No, I had just started. D.J.F. You had just started and then 1938 ruptured it? B.B.
Yes. I had just completed my own analysis in ’36 and was asked to wait a while before applying so that it was sure that it was not transference that resulted in my desire to be an analyst. The requirement was to wait more or less two years.
D.J.F. What about those Americans who came to Chicago who didn’t have European connections? How were they treated? B.B.
I think that there were very few lay analysts who were in Chicago. What was clear was that Alexander and the Institute preferred medical candidates, and I can’t remember any lay person besides the Europeans. There were very few lay analysts. But, on the other hand, I didn’t feel that there was any animosity against me. I was well accepted.
DJ.F. Did you actually teach on the faculty of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute? B.B.
I taught some courses for teachers and extension courses.
D.J.F. You never joined the faculty? B.B.
No.
DJ.F. Back to Vienna for one second. In the thirties, classical meant Freudian, not ego psychology. I know that you have a certain critique of Hartmann and still consider yourself to be a classical Freudian. What’s the distinction?
142 B.B.
BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING Well, I can only say what Freud said about Heinz Hartmann. He said Heinz has to put on his glasses which change all clinical experience into adaptive statements. In some way, Freud was critical.
D.J.F. Hartmann was also his analysand, wasn’t he? B.B.
That’s right.
D.J.F. In sum, you object to it because it is too theoretical and too distant from clinical experience? B.B.
It seems to me, that’s right. I like to stick closely to the clinical experience.
D.J.F. Is there something objectionable about the idea of neutralization and adaptation? You never entirely subscribed to ego psychology. B.B.
I have no reservations about ego psychology, only that I feel that psychoanalysis is an art and not a science. I am critical of the efforts to make it an objective science when it is an art.
D.J.F. Which is what Hartmann tried to do? B.B. Right. D.J.F. Based on your experience, would you say that the future of psychoanalysis ought not to be in the hands of clinicians alone, but rather in the hands of independently minded researchers and intellectuals? B.B.
Well [laughs] after all, I would have to speak against me and my own experience. I felt that the university is a very important place for freedom of thought and generosity in the acceptance of deviant opinions, which I think is a very significant element in the future development of any discipline. But psychoanalysis as such doesn’t lend itself too well to the academic career. On the other hand, I think that the humanistic trends that you can find at a great university are very advantageous to psychoanalysis.
D.J.F. If psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic associations remain dominated by private practice clinicians, by people who are not committed to thinking, or to contributing to the literature and conducting serious research, is the discipline in danger?
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I think that development in psychoanalysis has to be based on clinical experience. Whether one is a medical doctor or not doesn’t determine whether one learns from one’s own clinical experience. I always felt that to be a full-time practitioner of psychoanalysis is a difficult task because one gets caught up too much in one’s patients. One spends all one’s time with the patient hours and it leaves no time to do one’s own thinking. Freud could do that; to see patients all day and then at night write these papers; but there are very few Freuds around. Progress in psychoanalysis will come from people who have time to cogitate on their experience.
D.J.F. You have described your years in Chicago as the happiest and most creative in your life. Yet the assignment you took on was one of the most difficult, if not impossible, namely the understanding of the inner world and the psychological processes of autistic and severely disturbed children. What was your inner need to work with the most elusive of cases? B.B.
[laughs] That’s a complicated story. It really began in Vienna where Anna Freud saw an autistic American child, a mute American child. She thought it would be interesting to find out what psychoanalysis could do for such an abnormal child. But, in order to be effective, the child would have to live in a home that is completely psychoanalytically organized. One hour a week, six hours a week wouldn’t do it; it would have to be day and night. Through a complicated configuration of circumstances, this mother then came to us, my [first] wife and I. We took this child into our house as an experiment for a few months; this experiment lasted for seven years ‘til the Anschluss. It was a fascinating experience to live and work with this child. I tried to help her to begin to talk and to learn in school. It was a fascinating experience.
D.J.F. What was your motivation? Why did you want to take on therapeutic work with the incurable? B.B.
It was one way for me to cope with the experience of the concentration camp. It was the opposite of that experience in the concentration camp, which was deliberately personality destroying to learn to rehabilitate personalities.
D.J.F. With this particular population of patients, how does one evaluate what is a clinical success, a cure? B.B.
When you start out with hopeless cases, you can never cure them; you can only rehabilitate them so they can function in society. They retain
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BETTELHEIM: LIVING AND DYING certain odd characteristics. Although some of the students with whom I worked have really been completely healed, but they are the exceptions I would say.
D.J.F. It there such a thing as a cure or a therapeutic success even for a socalled normal neurotic? B.B.
[laughs] I’ll leave that one up to you!
D.J.F. At the Orthogenic School no one could get in without permission and anyone could leave at any time. Some people have called that a noble experiment with a utopian concept, not used in a denigrating but rather in the descriptive sense. Would you agree with that description? B.B.
No, I think that what we did is what the patients required. I don’t think that it is utopian to do right by the patient. It seems to be the only thing that is appropriate.
Chapter Seven first appeared in Society, Vol. 28, No. 3. March/April 1991, pp. 61-69; and in Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (1991), pp. 159-175.
Eight
The Suicide of a Survivor: Some Intimate Perceptions of Bettelheim’s Suicide
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Albert Camus, 1942
In his final months of life, Bruno Bettelheim was a frail, ailing figure with a corpse-like appearance. To gaze at him was to see a devitalized and exhausted human being. He lived out his last years burdened by a variety of physical and psychological illnesses. Before arriving in Southern California, he had suffered from a mild stroke. He complained of residues from the stroke, including frustration about physical activity, a pervasive feeling that his body was betraying him; he walked with a slight limp and needed a cane for assistance; he was no longer able to exercise by walking long distances; and he experienced extreme discomfort, even slight disorientation, at getting into and out of a chair. The stroke had also impaired his handwriting and his capacity to type, severely inhibiting the composition of his books and articles.1 Like many stroke victims, Bettelheim’s emotional state oscillated between depression and anguish, mood swings partly resulting from the necessity to curtail his activities. My relationship with Bettelheim began with an epistolary exchange. I had published a review essay of his 1982 essay Freud and Man’s Soul.2 I took the risk of sending it to him in Northern California. Not surprised by the courteousness and intelligence of his reply, its immediacy was striking. The rapidity of his answer indicated that he cared deeply about intellectual dialogue. Perhaps it indicated his isolation and loneliness. He encouraged me to deepen my researches into Freud’s use of language. Writing as a senior scholar to a junior one, he generously offered me some further bibliographical citations. As a letter writer, Bettelheim was opinionated, charming, selfreferential, and wasted no words. When I subsequently learned of his move to Southern California, I wrote again, asking if he wished to have a visitor. He
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telephoned me immediately and our friendship began. It lasted from April 1988 until January 1990. Describing any friendship is an elusive matter and this friendship is particularly hard to decipher. We were two academically trained lay analysts separated by two generations and by widely different sensibilities, by divergent political and cultural orientations. I would almost always visit him at his home and subsequently at his apartment. My wife and I twice invited him to our home for dinner, once just the three of us, and once with a group of eight colleagues who wished to meet him. There was a pattern to our talks. In principle, I listened. I occasionally asked questions. I learned quickly not to contradict him or to get contentious. Bettelheim would reminisce, becoming flooded with memories and feelings, almost as if he were returning to earlier days. As a historian of psychoanalysis, I was fascinated by his experiences in Vienna in the period between the two world wars, intrigued by his direct and tragic knowledge of the Nazi concentration camps. Bettelheim would finish a story or an anecdote and then add pessimistically: “But that’s ancient history.” This afterthought implied that no one would ever bother to take an interest or grasp his story’s historical or clinical relevance. I believe he liked me because I attended to his narratives, trying to understand his perspective and point of view. Our relationship once moved from the private to the public sphere. I had arranged to have Bettelheim offered an honorary membership in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, an honor that was deeply significant to him, especially because of his former friendships with Otto Fenichel and Ernst Simmel, the two Central European founders of the Institute. On May 18, 1989, Bettelheim was formally inducted into the Institute and he read a paper before the Society called “How I Became a Psychoanalyst” that evening.3 As the formal discussant, I presented a condensed paper that summarized the seminal themes of his scholarship over his lifetime.4 Bettelheim commented ironically on my talk in the manner of Mark Twain, thanking me for “the beautiful eulogy of him.” In the years I knew him, Bettelheim was also impaired by a condition of esophageal diverticulum, an out-pouching of tissue around the esophagus that interfered with swallowing; this made it miserable for him to eat solids and severely demoralized him. He had frequent, sometimes frightening, coughing jags; catching his breath became a major ordeal. Though warned by his physicians that surgery was both risky and not always successful for a man of his age, Bettelheim underwent a surgical procedure for his diverticulum and in his recovery regained an ability to eat and swallow. Unfortunately, he developed a condition of pneumonia during his stay in the hospital, a pneumonia that would recur. He was resilient. He recovered. During these years, he suffered almost continuously from depression, sometimes mild, often severe. For at least some of the time, he took antidepressants prescribed by one of his doctors. With the recommendation of another psychoanalytically trained colleague and myself, Bettelheim entered a
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course of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for his depression; he stated sarcastically that he went back into therapy out of his “faith in psychoanalysis.” After searching our minds for an appropriate referral (we actually joked out loud in his presence: Who could we refer Bettelheim to in Los Angeles? To someone distinguished, but over ninety? To Freud?), we suggested a mature, European trained analyst, Miriam Williams, M.D.. This analyst, we anticipated, would be able to resonate with Bettelheim’s current life situation and crisis, while being fluent with his mother tongue. He told me subsequently that he had benefited from this course of therapy, which may have lasted over one year. Bettelheim’s central preoccupation in his last years was with suicide. He played with and discarded many possibilities for taking his life. He fantasized candidly about it and it was never absent from our conversations.5 He was ambivalent about it, to be sure. He postponed acting on it until early 1990 because he wanted to be alive for the birth of another grandchild to his daughter, Naomi, living in Silver Spring, Maryland. He also wished to witness the publication of his final book, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays.6 It became evident to me that he had thoroughly considered and eliminated various methods of suicide; his main concern was to do it right. His intention was not to survive and not to be further incapacitated by a bungled attempt. He often talked about taking an overdose of drugs, hoping for a quick and painless ending. He rejected this option because he feared that he might not absorb the pills, that he might vomit them up, or that he might suffer terrible side effects and be required to have his stomach pumped. He thought about jumping from the fifth floor of his Santa Monica apartment, but rejected the possibility because it was not a sure thing: he might endure as a cripple or invalid, exacerbating his current situation, becoming too immobilized to be able to take his life. For the first time in his life, he lamented that he was not medically trained because he could not use medical expertise about death, drugs, and the body. In the presence of my father, a physician, I once witnessed Bettelheim asking specific questions about the efficacy of air embolus as a method of suicide, that is, injecting air into the vein with a syringe in order to kill oneself; he rejected this course because of the potential bleeding. He also asked this physician about the precise amount of Demerol needed for a lethal dose. The normal dosage of Demerol, a synthetic morphine, is approximately 50 mg; he was told that 100 to 200 mg might be sufficient. Demerol was risky because it too, might be vomited up. Bettelheim inquired of this doctor if he would be willing to prescribe the medicine. The physician declined. Bettelheim was aware of the Hemlock Society, a euthanasia association designed to allow elderly and terminally sick individuals the right to die privately and in a dignified manner. To the best of my knowledge, he never made contact with members of the Hemlock Society. He and I also discussed his plans to travel to Holland, where he would receive a lethal injection and die peacefully under medical supervision. This procedure is
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apparently legal in Holland. His son Eric planned to accompany him on this last trip to Holland. Much to Bettelheim’s chagrin, the physician who agreed to administer this fatal dose himself died of a heart attack just weeks before he had scheduled his trip. Bettelheim was terribly disappointed. He urged me and others to help him find another Dutch physician who would agree to this procedure. The New York Times reported that Bettelheim died of suicide on March 13, 1990. He suffocated himself by placing a plastic bag over his head.7 Subsequent reports indicated that he had ingested alcohol and pills prior to the asphyxiation. Medical experts disagree in evaluating this method of killing oneself. Some say it is relatively quick and painless; others insist that asphyxiation is a terribly violent and difficult way to die. Bettelheim never mentioned suicide by recourse to a plastic bag in our conversations. He evidently left a suicide note, the contents of which were not initially made public.8 Psychologically, Bettelheim struck me as being in a continual state of dejection. He perked up and became animated in company, but he was not able to sustain an upbeat mood for long periods. He was depressed about having to limit his physical and mental activity, devastated about the diminution of his creativity. He played with the idea of writing another book, contemplating one centered on the psychoanalytic study of painting, thus combining two of his earliest interests. When I pressed him for a more specific theme, he was uncharacteristically vague; he mentioned the idea of examining dreams or the dream process as represented in European painting since the Renaissance. Bettelheim stated sadly that he lacked the energy and discipline to begin, let alone complete, such a project, which might require years of intellectual effort, years beyond his reach. Besides acknowledging an inability to think and to focus, Bettelheim was pained by the incapacity to generate new ideas. This was a narcissistic wound to him. He had trouble getting out of bed. He was desperately lonely and isolated. He was fatigued, irritable, easily disgusted with people or things. For someone who never suffered fools easily, he became even more contemptuous of human stupidity, which he saw everywhere. Likewise, he openly disdained common human foibles. It is hard to estimate how much of his contempt veiled self-contempt. Self-analysis never slid into self-laceration in my presence; self-depreciation was part of Bettelheim’s idiom, but I never recall it descending into self-reproach. He was unable to overcome a loss of interest in the world; I noticed that even the Sunday newspaper delivered to his apartment was left unopened and unread. A former passionate concern with politics and social issues had drained away.9 Like other cultivated Viennese intellectuals of the inter-war years, Bettelheim was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about classical music, film, and the theater; he owned a wonderful record collection to which he stopped listening. He became increasingly reclusive, seldom going to a play or to the cinema. I once took him to an enthralling Beethoven chamber music
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concert played by a first-rate ensemble at UCLA; he confessed that he found this music, once so inspirational and so vitalizing, hard to follow. His mind wandered and he became lost by the complexity of the performance.10 At the end of his life, he took some solace in reading. He no longer wrote and he refused to dictate his thoughts to a secretary. Reading no longer compensated him for the absence of pleasure in his life. He was unable to drive and increasingly unable to take care of himself, finding himself dependent on a housekeeper. He had few cohorts or age mates in Southern California. His teaching and supervisory activities became severely restricted as his health failed; he lacked the energy to speak publicly; the loss of his speaking platform and of his teaching deprived him of deeply meaningful professional activities, areas of high self-esteem and achievement. He steadily felt like a burden on others. To quote his own words, he was “decathecting” from the world and from people, withdrawing his investment in relationships so as to better prepare himself for the end of life. At my last visit with him, I brought a bottle of French champagne to toast him and to salute the recent publication of Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays. Bettelheim insisted courteously that we not open the bottle, saying that he was in no mood for celebration. He urged me to enjoy the champagne with my wife. That was typical of his attitude in those last months. I cannot answer why he committed suicide or selected the method he used. I regard his suicide as an end to the torment, loneliness, and sense of futility about his present and future. Suicide was Bettelheim’s way of refusing to fall helpless, his refusal to submit to a meaningless, vegetative life. Taking his life allowed him to escape from the despair and emptiness that pervaded his everyday existence. Having withdrawn from the world and feeling enervated, Bettelheim lacked the time, strength, and resources to reawaken and to renew himself. If his suicide was multi-determined, if it is not explainable by one theory or one cause, it is not useful to think of it as symptomatic of an illness or the expression of an immoral act. Certainly, one factor that contributed to the unbearable anguish of his last years was the total rupture of his relations with his daughter Ruth Bettelheim, a clinical psychologist. Bettelheim was terribly hurt and terribly disappointed by the abrupt end of all relations with her and until the last weeks of his life with her children, his grandchildren. To understand something of Bettelheim’s emotional state before his suicide, I would underscore the critical importance of two-party relations, the precipitating role that the loss of a significant other like a child can have on a parent. The devastating irony that a world-class expert on parenting had severed relations with a treasured child was not lost on him. I once asked Bettelheim if he was enraged at his abandonment by his daughter. He replied that he was not consciously angry at her. She has not stepped forward to record her version of these events. As our conversations turned ineluctably to suicide, I experienced a variety of powerful feelings, often conflicting ones. First and foremost was a
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sense of sadness that Bettelheim was determined to end his life, that this willful and focused man was not to be deterred. The attitude I adopted was acceptable and comfortable to both of us: the analytic stance. I listened, tried to understand, and attempted to remain empathically attuned to him. I did not give advice, nor offer unsolicited suggestions. I would offer a tentative interpretation, usually in the hope of letting him run with it, seeing if it offered any possibilities of clarification. I neither reassured him nor reinforced his suicidal intentions. Given his enervated and vegetative state, I often found it depressing to be around him. Our meetings seldom lasted more than two hours. I left them psychologically exhausted. They always stimulated me to reflect on and ponder the meanings of his utterances. Bettelheim was neither my analyst, my supervisor, my teacher, nor my mentor. This freed both of us to talk and to engage in frankly open exchanges and debates. Transferential issues were present. My relationship to Bettelheim was complicated by its convergence with the terminal phase and ultimately the termination of my training analysis with Rudolf Ekstein. Actually, my conversations with Bettelheim continued for almost one year after my analysis ended. Termination is always a loss and an ending, symbolically a death. Though we rarely touched directly upon themes in my own analysis, my friendship with Bettelheim helped to ease the pain of my separation from Ekstein; I now see it as part of my mourning process. Though younger than Bettelheim, Ekstein was a mature lay analyst, also trained in Vienna, who was Bettelheim’s closest friend in Los Angeles. I knew that Bettelheim was telling me deeply troubling and personal things that he did not discuss with my analyst. This gave me privileged access to his inner world, but it also gave rise in me to a double burden: of feelings of guilt on the one hand, and feelings of triumph over my former analyst for knowing things that he did not know on the other. Let me add that Bettelheim realized perfectly well that I was in analysis with Ekstein and that he never said or did anything disrespectful or counter therapeutic regarding my analytic experience. My friendship with Bettelheim then immersed me in the existential dilemmas and psychological problematic of old age. It provided me with a window into and an articulate voice about what happens to a sensitive individual who runs out of options, whose viable choices are eliminated, and who experiences the decline of generativity. My reactions to these conversations with Bettelheim were alternatively enlightening, sobering, and painful. It made me aware of my own limitations; I knew that I could not rescue Bettelheim, that I could not derail him from his choice to end his life. The best I could do was to understand not judge, not try to distance or detach myself, not disconnect from my own conflicting emotions and to tap into my own historical and psychoanalytic imagination to grasp the poignancy of his situation. Bettelheim, I should add, always treated me non-condescendingly. He offered to refer analytic patients to me. And he always spoke honestly about
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his desires to end his life. Perhaps the strangest and most surprising aspects of our extended discussions of suicide was the intimacy that emerged between us. Despite being privy to these intense revelations with Bettelheim, I must add that I still felt an enormous sense of shock, loss, and personal disbelief when I learned of his suicide. I was not surprised, but I was devastated nonetheless. I felt deprived by his absence. Abandonment is easy to grasp intellectually, but disruptive emotionally. I am convinced, though it is beyond the scope of this paper, that the assault on Bettelheim’s clinical and intellectual reputation since his suicide stems, at least in part, from the rage and outrage triggered by feelings of abandonment both on the part of his detractors and defenders, myself included.11 Bettelheim committed suicide on the exact day March 13th of the Nazi takeover of Austria, fifty-two years after those events. Psychoanalysts understand the powerful symbolic effects of anniversaries, particularly their ability to recapitulate disintegrating feelings of loss and grief. It is not accidental that Bettelheim chose the day when the Nazis marched into Vienna. His life was drastically altered by those events and by his incarceration in German concentration camps. Part of his depressive character stemmed at least partially from the prolonged traumatic experience of fascism and the memories, fantasies, and feelings generated by the concentration camps, the ensemble of which were not and could not be worked through. Bettelheim's guilt about surviving, perhaps his guilt and shame about his own behavior in surviving, was never repaired.12 Perhaps these wounds are irreparable, the victims become doomed to endure extraordinary misery and horrific memories as long as they live. Suicide then becomes a rational way out of this psychological and existential impasse, putting a stop to the consciousness of repetitive trauma and endless suffering. Survivor guilt in Bettelheim’s case went with a lifelong preoccupation with suicide and the Freudian concept of the death drive, as well as with the psychodynamic defenses against hatred, dependency, and the loss of hope, including his own. As a concentration camp survivor, Bettelheim had to contend with the painful reminiscences of those who were tortured and died, but who could not be helped or rescued, including relatives and comrades. He was also tormented by the ways in which Holocaust survivors unconsciously identified with some of the worst features of their torturers, including the assumption of an authoritarian and dogmatic character style. One of the most persistently terrifying aspects of surviving the camps was the degree to which the fascist personality became imprinted on the personality of the survivor. Bettelheim often told me that the experience of being a concentration camp inmate was beyond communication or transmission through teaching. For the survivors, their unimaginable fate included the internalization of something analogous to a metallic foreign object. They were doomed to live out their days, as the historian Saul Friedlander expressed it, as if they contained “shards of steel” that would never heal.13 Despite Bettelheim’s commitment to non-sentimentalized memory and to political and personal
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resistance to the concentration camps, he never fully recuperated from this personal history. His suicide, once again, documents how fragmenting that experience was, testifying to its shattering effects even after half a century. Concentration camp victims become dejected because they lose everything they care for in their previous lives. They become paralyzed with despair and emptiness. They rage against their fate. They become emotionally numb, affectively dead. They begin to live non-lives. Their consciousness becomes dominated by depressive feelings and the unrelenting sense of irrevocable loss. For Bettelheim, old age and the prospects of life in a nursing home did not promise a significant chance, a possibility of renewal of life. What he dreaded was becoming a “Muslim,” an unfortunate concentration camp term designating a living corpse, a totally helpless and dependent human being.14 Persevering as an anonymous, discarded, and decrepit body confined to an old age home was simply a reenactment of his years of incarceration, of becoming passive and pathetic. With hope destroyed, with his autonomy jeopardized, with physical illness and incapacitation a sure prediction for the future, Bettelheim opted for suicide. When I once asked him if he was concerned about how his audience might perceive his suicide in the future, that it might be impossible to discuss his work without an inevitable reference to his suicide, he replied that he was unconcerned about posterity. He put it bluntly: “I do not give a damn.” He was defiantly indifferent about his death tarnishing his historical reputation. From the first moment of his transport to the Fascist concentration camps in 1938, Bettelheim became acutely aware of the mentally deteriorating aspects of this experience to the inmate. Time does not heal some wounds. Self-knowledge is sometimes not enough. Concentration camp survivors suffer from horrific reminiscences. Although weary and groggy, after receiving from the Gestapo both a bayonet wound and a severe injury to his head, he reported wondering “all the time that man can endure so much without committing suicide or going insane.”15 His life history and work became an introspective reflection on this act of enduring. Toward the conclusion of The Informed Heart (1960), Bettelheim narrated the tragic story of a female concentration camp prisoner who risked death by assassinating an SS guard. The prisoner had formerly been a dancer. Lined up naked before entering the gas chamber, she was commanded to dance for the SS guard. Reversing her sense of humiliation, refusing her state of bondage, she commenced to dance and managed to seize the SS’s gun and to shoot him. She was immediately assassinated. Bettelheim describes this story of suicide as both a stirring and exemplary act of resistance. It demonstrated the momentary transformation of extreme brutalization and dehumanization into an active restoration of her former self. For a moment, she reassumed a self of dignity, self-respect, and a capacity for sentient and meaningful behavior. She recovered her personality and responded to a grotesque situation with an appropriate degree of revolt and the reassertion of her individuality, even if it led to her death:
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Exercising the last freedom that not even the concentration camp could take away to decide how one wishes to think and feel about the conditions of one’s life this dancer threw off her real prison. This she could do because she was willing to risk her life to achieve autonomy once more. If we do that, then if we cannot live, at least we die as men.16
Bettelheim’s suicide can also be understood as the determination to assert his individual autonomy. Unwilling to endure a slow, meaningless death in an old age home, unable to maintain his identity as a human being in a bureaucratic system that regarded him as a thing to be administered to, that treated him without care or compassion, taking his own life became his refusal of the internal prison, the prison house of his personal and historical memory. Suicide became his last dance, his final affirmation of himself as a man. Notes 1. 2. 3.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13.
David James Fisher, “Homage to Bettelheim,” in Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick, 1991), pp. 177-181. David James Fisher, “Review of Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul,” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1983, pp. 20-26. Leslie M. Kirschenbaum, “Report of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim’s Presentation ‘How I Became A Psychoanalyst,’” Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Summer, 1989, pp. 3-8; Bettelheim’s talk became chapter two of his Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays (New York, 1990). pp. 24-38. David James Fisher, “Bruno Bettelheim’s Achievement,” Free Associations, No., 22, 1991, pp. 191-201. David James Fisher, “A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim,” in Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick, 1991), pp. 159175. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays (New York, 1990). Daniel Goleman, “Bruno Bettelheim Dies at 86. Psychoanalyst of Vast Import,” New York Times, March 14, 1990. Daniel Goleman, “Bettelheim’s Suicide Tied to Many Troubles,” New York Times, March 15, 1990. David James Fisher, “Homage to Bettelheim,” in Fisher, Cultural Theory And Psychoanalytic Tradition, pp. 177-181. David James Fisher, “Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul,” in Fisher, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition, pp. 139-157. David James Fisher, “Concerning Bruno Bettelheim,” Society, Vol. 28, No. 5, 1991, pp. 6-9; David James Fisher and Rudolf Ekstein, “An Open Letter to Newsweek, “ Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, 1991, pp. 50-51. David James Fisher, “A Final Conversation with Bruno Bettelheim,” in Fisher Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition, pp. 159-175. Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes (New York, 1979), translated by Helen R. Lane, p. 110.
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14. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York, 1960), pp. 151-156, 245. 15. Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” in Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York, 1979), pp. 61; originally published in 1943 in The Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 38, pp. 417-452. 16. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York, 1960), p. 259.
Chapter Eight appeared in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 591-602; it was published in French in the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, Vol. 43, Spring, 1991, pp. 313-318, translated by Michelle Moreau-Ricaud.
Nine
Homage to Bettelheim
Korczak knew well that despite his utter devotion to children, he himself was the product of a faulty upbringing and therefore not free of shortcomings; his character to some degree has been botched up by the way he was brought up, as is true for all of us. Bruno Bettelheim, 1990
I came to know Bruno Bettelheim in the waning years of his life. Many things separated us; many things united us. If I did not and could not share his mother tongue, his classical education at the University of Vienna, his age, his unique historical experiences, the Holocaust, his emigration to the United States, and his singular work with severely disturbed children, I could and did share with him a visceral antifascism, a commitment to lay analysis, a fascination with psychoanalytic hermeneutics, a concern with grasping contemporary history, and an interest in asking mordant questions. There was a spirit of gravity about him, an intellectual seriousness and an emotional depth, most of which stemmed from the force of his personality, much of which resulted from the tragic weight of his historical consciousness above all his memory of German fascism and the concentration camps. I always found him to be courteous, formal in an European sense, a bit remote; yet there was always a compelling presence about him, a personal dignity, a twinkle in his eyes, an ironic sense of humor, an intolerance of the foolishness and stupidity of human beings, a capacity to be self-deprecating and self-critical. His toughness was legendary; he also directed that toughness on himself, as evidenced by his remarkable work discipline and by the prolific quality and quantity of his publications. Bettelheim once confessed to me, poignantly, that he wished I could have known him ten years ago. Yet until the end of his life, he maintained a spark of intellectual vitality, focusing his vast storehouse of erudition on contemporaneous issues of real concern to his public. In our talks together, he
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frequently made a gesture of touching, almost massaging his head, when he spoke; this was a man who clearly had a narcissistic investment in the mind, and when he could no longer generate fresh and original ideas, he no longer wished to live. In the years I knew him he was depressed, often suicidally depressed. He spoke candidly, almost clinically, about his suicidal intentions. It became clear to me that he had researched, thought through, and convinced himself that this was the only courageous way out, the only dignified path for him at his stage in life. He knew that he had completed his creative and scholarly work. He had grown despondent after the illness and death of his wife in 1984, his companion for over forty-three years. He was terribly bitter and resigned about the rupture of his relations with his daughter, his hopes shattered after living with her in Santa Monica. A mild stroke had disabled him to the extent that writing and typing became major chores for him; it was sad to watch him labor over autographing copies of his books when I asked him to lecture before my class on Freud's Cultural Writings at UCLA. When I last saw him in January 1990, I observed how signing his recently published book, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays (1990), required a major expenditure of effort. Bettelheim was a philosopher of psychoanalysis who spoke a fluent, ordinary language that was not condescending to his audience. That language resonated with a large, influential, international public because it touched people in their profoundest depths; he targeted his writings to appeal to the heart and intellect simultaneously. Like a finely trained European intellectual, he knew how to raise elusive questions about history, ethics, psychoanalysis, children and parenting; he knew how to research, how to read texts, how to investigate and explicate the psychological and emotional nuances of things, often grasping the latent meaning of themes between the lines. He was determined not to get bogged down in highly technical or overly specialized questions, not to write in jargon. He developed a distinct style and a discernible voice in which he communicated on a visceral level with human beings, responding soul-to-soul, much of which emanated from a source of empathic sensitivity in his own psyche. He produced a distinguished and varied body of writings that demands a radical distinction between authentic feeling and cheap sentimentality, between rigorous analysis and reciting established pieties, between realistic and responsible confrontations with difficult choices and an objection to positions flowing from denial, avoidance, or reaction-formation. Most of his texts abound with a sincere humanity, compassion, and care, especially those devoted to comprehending the inner lives of the severely disturbed child; yet his works also served to de-romanticize and demystify. In short, his humanism was not simple-minded, soft, overly optimistic, nor oblivious to reality considerations. For Bettelheim the privilege of being a psychoanalyst and of practicing, teaching, transmitting, and modifying psychoanalytic theory and practice, consisted in a deeply ingrained respect for the human being, for his or her own
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privacy, his individual uniqueness, his struggles, his quest for truth, his aspirations toward personal forms of liberation, creativity, and playfulness. These values may reflect his identification with Freud and with the classical liberalism of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie of the interwar years. He was one of the last truly independent voices in the world of psychoanalysis, one of those irreverent iconoclasts who never concerned himself about establishment institutions or psychoanalytic institutes, having considerable disdain about regional, national, or international psychoanalytic doctrinal quarrels. He regarded these quarrels as beside the point. As a self-assured, critical voice, he spoke his mind often in a combative, acerbic, intolerant way, but always thoughtfully, succinctly, pungently. I learned quickly that on certain issues it was futile to debate with him; more than once I found him to be opinionated, authoritarian, rather harsh and conservative in his judgments on the politics of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, on the critique of American foreign policy, on the theoretical attempt to link Marxism with psychoanalysis. However, even in his decline, dialogue was possible with him; he could be astonishingly disarming and empathic about problems that he knew were existentially and psychologically pressing. Bettelheim was a man full of stories. If one caught him in the right mood, he was ready to reminisce. For him psychoanalysis was not an impossible profession, it was a “spooky” profession, practiced by a gallery of rogues, geniuses, shamans, priests, false prophets, narcissists, exhibitionists, functionaries, and occasionally spooks. However, when all was said and done, he maintained a pride about psychoanalysis, finding it intriguing, impossible to pin down, and endlessly evocative. Bettelheim himself could be a little spooky. He had fond and extraordinarily favorable things to say about Wilhelm Reich, whom he knew in Vienna as a young man, regarding him as “the” seminal psychoanalytic thinker and clinician of the century. Whenever he spoke of him, he always noted Reich’s vast vitality and unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I sensed that Bettelheim identified with Reich because he too, felt marginalized and ostracized by official psychoanalysis, at least in America. For Bettelheim, Reich’s Character Analysis (1933) represented the birth of modern psychoanalytic theory and practice. He had penetrating, if often biting anecdotes about other luminaries in the psychoanalytic movement, including Margaret Mahler, Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Kurt Eissler, D.W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Franz Alexander, and Heinz Kohut. On my last visit with Bettelheim, I asked him for his clinical advice on persistent problems I was having with several patients who were children of Holocaust survivors. Bettelheim generously urged me to be patient, kind, sensitive, calm, and to remain the master of my own anxieties; to learn to tolerate better the extended process of not knowing; to not rush into interpretations that reconstructed memories or fantasies of the Holocaust; to tough out the often ferocious negative transferences (which he considered the most difficult task to learn and to assimilate in psychoanalytic technique); and to consider and to reflect on the countertransference as an authentic way into
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the mind and soul of the patient. Then he paused and said with a shock of painful recognition: “You know, my children are children of a Holocaust survivor.” This is the Bettelheim I remember: helpful, incisive, caring, yet always personal, affectively attuned to the emotional and historical interplay of all interpersonal encounters.
Chapter Nine appeared in The Partisan Review, Winter, 1990, No. 4, pp. 627-629; The Psychohistory Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, Winter, 1991, pp. 255-261.
Ten
An Open Letter to Newsweek
The following letter to Newsweek was written in response to an article published in their “Lifestyle” section of September 10, 1990. The Letters Editor ran a truncated version of our letter in the issue of October 8, 1990. In the interests of fairness, we are publishing the full text here. We were concerned about the distorted impression left by Nina Darnton’s piece “‘Beno Brutalheim’?” (Lifestyle, Sept. 10, 1990, pp. 59-60). With Bettelheim dead and unable to respond, it unleashes Bettelheim bashing in a most irresponsible fashion. The article presents a sensationalized and nasty portrait of him as the son of a bitch/genius who violated his clinical ethics by intimidating, devaluing, and physically injuring his hospitalized patients. Darnton alleges that he was sadistic and out of control. All of her documentation is suspect and flagrantly decontextualized; we learn nothing about the individuals being interviewed; more pertinently, we never learn about their reliability. Are isolated memories being blown out of proportion? Do we get fantasies of the doctor by former patients being reported as selfevident facts? Do the critics of Bettelheim have their own agendas? Why didn’t they speak out while he was still alive? We question Darnton’s professionalism and honesty as a journalist. Her research methods are shabby and imprecise. She did little or no fact checking. For example, she states two completely inaccurate facts about Dr. Rudolf Ekstein. (“Bettelheim’s old friend Rudolf Ekstein, a retired California psychoanalyst now in his 70’s who knew Bettelheim in Vienna before the war...”). Dr. Ekstein is not retired. In point of fact, Dr. Ekstein told Darnton he had to cut short her interview with him in order to see a patient. It is also false that he knew Bettelheim in pre-World War II Vienna; they met in America in the 1950’s. This misinformation makes us suspect other inaccuracies in her article. Severely regressed and disturbed patients in psychiatric settings require firm boundaries and structures, as well as a staff treating them with kindness, tolerance, empathy, patience, and knowledge. These therapists are subjected to an ensemble of anxieties, frustrations, disappointments, and regressive pulls on them in their everyday encounters with such patients. No therapist is a saint. None have attained the perfect self-control and selfdiscipline to react without some semblance of emotional turmoil and even an occasional outburst. No clinician can practice his caring and internally
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consistent clinical philosophy in an absolutely impeccable fashion. At best they are “good enough” — exactly the ideal Bettelheim described in his book on parenting. As an administrator, Bettelheim was working with an extremely taxing patient population, a population of incurables, of individuals who had been given up by other therapists; he also had to contend with a spectrum of emotional responses to these patients on the part of his care-taking staff, who may have felt driven crazy by their patients at certain moments. Bettelheim, in short, had massive responsibilities for both his patients and his staff. He had to contend with the often primitive transferences of his patients and staff, as well as his own counter-transferences. That he expressed anger, impatience, frustration, and an authoritarian tone at times is not surprising or out of character. To insinuate that he was a cruel or insensitive bully — a patient abuser — seriously misrepresents the record. Bettelheim remains the empathic advocate of the helpless child and of the most inaccessible of patients. What strikes us as “abusive” and “brutal” is this scandalous and debunking journalism. It could potentially damage the recovery for the severely disturbed patients currently in psychiatric hospitals and clinics, eroding their trust in their care-takers; and shows no grasp of the psychological difficulties and therapeutic aspirations of mental health professionals, many of whom were educated by Bettelheim’s sparkling writings and inspired by his tough-minded humanity. Co-signed by Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D.
Chapter Ten appeared in The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Spring, 1991, pp. 50-51.
Eleven
Concerning Bruno Bettelheim: A Reply To Former Patients From The Orthogenic School
The poet Rimbaud characterized his own age as “a time of assassins.” Our contemporary era has degenerated into one in which corpses are assassinated. There is something unseemly about these polemical attacks on the dead Bruno Bettelheim. These letters constitute a campaign not only to spit on his dead body, but also to discredit, unsuccessfully in my opinion, the considerable corpus of his work and contribution. The vehemence of the letters by Jatich and Pekow, both identified as former patients at the Orthogenic School, make it difficult to engage in reasonable dialogue about Bettelheim’s ideas and historical significance; they seem intent on trying to trash his reputation, to besmirch his name. My interview with Bettelheim focuses on issues which were germane to Bettelheim in the final years of his life; it summarizes his mature reflections on old age, the legacy of the Holocaust, suicide, plus a number of episodes of special importance given his personal itinerary in the psychoanalytic movement in Europe and America; the latent sub-text of the conversation was his conflicts about taking his own life. By the way, my interview was not designed to avoid controversy. It was conducted in July and November, 1988, prior to the launching of exposes testifying to his apparent patient abuse and to the allegation of plagiarism in his book on fairy tales. My agreement with Bettelheim was not to publish this text until after his death because of the charged and controversial material in it on suicide. The rage and outrage against Bettelheim in these letters (and closely paralleling published articles elsewhere) far exceeds the boundaries of plausibility. There seems to be no limit to the rhetoric of denunciation and slander. I suspect that this blame directed at him is fueled by other sources, other resentments. I assume that the writers are motivated, at least in part, by a persistent sense of pain and betrayal at what they experienced and observed at the Orthogenic School. The grotesqueness of their portrait of Bettelheim makes good copy, but this demonology does not tally with my own knowledge of the man and my appreciation of his work. There were probably many Bruno Bettelheims. The one I knew in his mid-eighties was frail, charming, lucid, and always fascinating. He led a fascinating and productive life, certainly a life of contradiction and creativity, of paradox and generativity. If there was one common denominator, it was his unrelenting honesty. This honesty had a haunting and compelling quality. I
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believe that it sprang from three sources: his character, his experience of the Holocaust, and his identity as a humanistic psychoanalytic thinker and practitioner. All this pervades this final conversation, particularly his remarks on the personality fragmenting aspects of surviving the Nazi concentration camps and on the temptations of suicide. This candor, above all, this capacity to see himself and his world without self-deceptions in confronting historical, cultural, and therapeutic issues is what I valued most in Bettelheim. It may be the most powerful legacy of his contribution to psychoanalytic method and tradition. It could also be somewhat intimidating. It is thoroughly absent in the positions of those claiming to be his martyrs. If I must be labeled, I would call myself a critical admirer of Bettelheim. I admired his scholarship, the questions he raised in his popular essays, and his ability to examine and to dramatize impossible clinical and elusive historical problems, problems which are probably ethical issues. Neither his private nor his public persona was predicated on a need to be loved. As a famous man, and an outspoken one, often a dissenting voice, he was the target of a great deal of envy. At bottom he was a teacher who desired to have his thoughts and techniques studied, experienced personally, reflected upon, revised, and modified. Newsweek’s sensationalized attack on Bettelheim troubled me, not because I am one of his sycophants, but because I was appalled by its lack of balance and fairness. I questioned its research methods, its techniques of data gathering, and the utter unreliability and emotionality of the testimony against him exemplified, once again, in these declamatory and malicious letters to Society. Since Newsweek only saw fit to publish a truncated account of my letter (co-signed by Dr. Rudolf Ekstein), and misrepresented by Pekow, the interested reader may want to consult The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin, Spring, 1991, for the full text. To attack a dead man, as these letters do shamelessly, is to play a game that is safe, yet self-betraying. Here the so-called victims displace the putative victimizer. Revenge slides into rage, rage into vendetta against a corpse. It indicates the degree to which the dead Dr. Bettelheim continues to torment, dominate, and distort their lives. I am baffled why they let fifteen years or more pass before these vituperative insults were made public. These apparently successful individuals with articulate voices seemed unwilling to air their grievances while Bettelheim had the strength to answer. Why The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Commentary would open its pages to these denunciations remains another issue. Sensationalism sells; so does scandal, especially when it involves the apparent unmasking of a celebrated writer. To publish pieces that demolish the reputation of a distinguished, dead author and therapist is relatively easy pickings. After all, the dead do not threaten law suits and are no longer able to make caustic rebuttals; they are no longer able to present their point of view, or to correct the record.
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Perhaps on a deeper level, these vilifications aim to destroy the memory of an original psychoanalytic thinker who maintained a loyalty to the irreverent, critical, and interpretive possibilities of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic cultural criticism. I read these published accounts as bad faith attempts to dismantle the clinical influence and undermine the good name of contemporary psychoanalysis. Neoconservative organs like Commentary may have wished to devalue a penetrating and independent critic of their political and ideological stands. Bettelheim, after all, opposed Commentary’s complacent and selfcongratulatory tone. Rather than dealing with the substantive nature of his analysis of Jewish complicity in their own mass slaughter during the Holocaust, rather than debate his opposition to certain policies of the State of Israel, these publications preferred character assassination to authentic intellectual dialogue, scandalous accusations of abuse to honest working through of his ideas and social-psychological perspectives. Name-calling represents only another, somewhat primitive, form of banalization, of not taking a writer and his thoughts seriously. The dead Dr. Bettelheim, like all powerful dead fathers, continues to exercise an authority by his mythical-- and for some, demonic--presence. The Bettelheim myth can be demythologized and we can learn from his life and work, if we will only situate him historically and read his texts critically, that is to say, respectfully. These letters do nothing of the kind.
Chapter Eleven appeared in Society, Vol. 28, No. 5, July/August, 1991, pp.8-9.
Twelve
Two Letters From Bettelheim To The Author
Bruno Bettelheim ONE SIERRA LANE * PORTOLA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 94025 415-851-2018 November 24, 1982 Dear Dr. Fisher: Thank you very much for having sent me your very interesting article on Civilization and its Discontent [sic]. I read it and found it illuminating in regard to Freud’s controversy with Romain Rolland. As far as I understand your position, in my reading of it I found it much more assertive and convincing than I guess you did. But this might very well be due to the difference in time and place where I read it first, and where you did. This leads me to the main regret I have about your study: As a historian I would have hoped you would place this essay more in the context of the time in which Freud wrote it, a historical situation radically different from where one finds oneself today in California. Everything that is written is timeless and time bound. Your article does justice only to the first and not sufficiently to the latter. Incidentally, I am sure you realize that the title of this essay is badly mistranslated, something you might consider should you continue your study of it. Sincerely yours. Bruno Bettelheim
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June 24, 1983 Dear Dr. Fisher: I appreciate your courtesy of having sent me a copy of your review of my little book on the English translations of Freud. When I wrote it, I did not expect that everybody would agree with me, least of all the official psychoanalytic American establishment. Why should they, after having for years accepted these deficient translations as the bible? Their reaction to the book was mostly icy silence. If so, so be it. What pleased me was that I got many spontaneous reactions from a wide variety of intellectuals who wrote me that for the first time Freud made sense to them. They ranged from a Nobel prize winner in economics to the greatest living mathematician, to high school juniors. This gladdens me, because this is the group I tried to reach. I did not expect to make a dent among the psychoanalysts. If I write something I expect everybody to respond in terms of his or her frame of reference. If it stimulates somebody to some serious thinking, as you obviously were, this is all I can hope for. Just one correction: I did not plan to publish first an excerpt in The New Yorker. They picked up the book before publication from the publisher and decided to print part of it, which, of course, delighted me. But it was not planned by me, it was just a pleasant surprise. If you are interested in another reaction to the Strachey translations, if you have not yet read it, may I bring to your attention Darious Ornston’s article “Strachey’s Influence” in part 4 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, volume 63, 1982. As for Anna Freud’s authorization of these translations, this is a long and complex story which has to do with her relation to her father, and the role of guardian of psychoanalysis she chose. In regard to her the official psychoanalytic attitude is that everybody has ambivalences about his parents, with the one exception of Anna Freud. Well enough of that. Sincerely yours. Bruno Bettelheim
About the Author
David James Fisher, Ph.D., is Clinical Instructor, Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine, Senior Faculty Member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Dr. Fisher serves on the Robert Stoller Foundation Board and is a member of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. He has worked as an Associate Editor for North America for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on the advisory board of Society, and as an editor of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin. He did his doctoral work in European cultural and intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin under the tutelage of George L. Mosse and post-doctoral work in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes under the direction of Georges Haupt. Dr. Fisher has published three previous books, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (1988; 2004); Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (1991), and Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul: Essays on Bettelheim (2003). In addition, Dr. Fisher has authored over fifty journal articles and book reviews on contemporary French cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis, including essays on Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, Fenichel, and Spielrein. He is currently working on two projects: an essay on Camus, the psychology of the absurd and the Sisyphus complex; and with Joseph Natterson, a clinical and theoretical exploration of the psychology of lying in intimate relationships. Dr. Fisher is well regarded as a speaker and has lectured extensively, including in France, Canada, and Great Britain, as well as a number of prominent universities, including the California Institute of Technology, M.I. T., and Brandeis. He practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Los Angeles. Address for correspondence: David James Fisher, Ph.D., 9911, W. Pico Blvd., Suite 1280, Los Angeles, CA 90035, U.S.A. {email:
[email protected]}
References
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Coates, W.H. & White, H.V. (1970) The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe. New York: McGraw-Hill. Coen, S.J. (1988) How to Read Freud: A Critique of Recent Freud Scholarship. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 36 (2). Coles, R. (1970) Erik Erikson: The Growth of his Work. Boston: Little Brown. Coser, L.A. (1984) Refugee Scholars in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Darnton, N. (1990) Beno Brutalheim. Newsweek, September 10, 1990. Des Pres, T. (1976) The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press. Dolnick, E. (1998) Madness on the Couch. New York: Simon & Schuster. Duczynska, I. (1978) Workers in Arms: The Austrian Schutzbund and Civil War of 1934. New York: Monthly Review Press. Ekstein, R. (1937) Zur Philosophie der Psychologie. Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna. Ekstein, R. (1941) The Philosophical Refutation. In The Language of Psychotherapy.Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989. Ekstein, R. (1942) The Language of Psychology and of Everyday Life. In The Language of Psychotherapy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989. Ekstein, R. (1966) Children of Time and Space, Of Action and Impulse. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Ekstein, R. (1968) Review of Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 37(2): 296-297. Ekstein, R. (1969a) Introduction. The Project on Childhood Psychosis: Second Report. The Reiss-Davis Clinic Bulletin, 6: 58-59. Ekstein, R. (1969b) The Full Fortress. Psychiatry and Social Science Review. 3(8). Ekstein, R. (1969c) Rudolf Ekstein’s Rejoinder to Rimland. Contemporary Psychology. 14: 41 Ekstein, R. (1971) The Challenge: Despair and Hope in the Conquest of Inner Space. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ekstein, R. (1973) In Quest of the Professional Self. In The Language of Psychotherapy, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989, 197-215. Ekstein, R. (1974) A Home for the Heart by Bruno Bettelheim. Bulletin of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Ekstein, R. (1976) In Search of Love and Competence. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ekstein, R. (1990a) Sigmund Freud and Politics and A Return to Immanuel Kant’s ‘The Strife of the Faculties.’ Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin: Spring, 1990: 5- 14. Ekstein, R. (1990b) My Friend Bruno: The Way I Remember Him. Los Angeles Psychoanalytical Bulletin: Fall, 1990: 24-29. Ekstein, R. (1991) Preface. In Heller, P. A Child Analysis with Anna Freud. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, pp. ix –xv. Ekstein, R. (1992) Forward. In S. Gardner and G. Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology 1918-1939. New York: Praeger. pp. vii-ix Ekstein, R. & Wallerstein R.S. (1958) The Teaching and Learning of Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Ekstein, R. & Fisher, D.J. (1990). Bettelheim Battle. Newsweek, October 8, 1990 Ekstein, R. & Motto, R. (1969) From Learning for Love to Love of Learning: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Education. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Eliot, S. (2002) Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Eliot, T.S. (1952) Little Gidding. In T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 19091950. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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Fisher, D.J. & Ekstein, R. (1990) Bettelheim Battle. Newsweek, October 8, 1990. Fisher, D.J. & Ekstein, R. (1991) An Open Letter to Newsweek. Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin: pp.50-51. Frattaroli, E. (2001) Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain. New York: Penguin Books. Freud, S. 1953-73. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Ed. and trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. (Referred to in subsequent references as Standard Edition) Freud, S. (1909) Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Standard Edition, 10. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, 18. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, S. (1926) The Question of Lay Analysis. Standard Edition, 20. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, S. (1938) A Comment on Anti-Semitism. Standard Edition, 23. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Freud, S. (1939) Moses and Monotheism. Standard Edition, 23. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Friedländer, S. (1979) When Memory Comes. (trans. Helen. R. Lane) New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friedman, L.J. (1999) Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribner. Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom. New York: Henry Holt. Goleman, D. (1990a) Bruno Bettelheim Dies at 86. Psychoanalyst of Vast Import. New York Times, March 14, 1990. Goleman, D. (1990b) Bettelheim’s Suicide Tied to Many Troubles. New York Times, March 15, 1990. Heilbut, A. (1983) Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’s to the Present. New York: Viking Press. Hobsbawn, E.J. (1978) Introduction. In Duczynska, I., Workers in Arms: The Austrian Schutzbund and Civil War. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 1-10. Hunter, V. [Ed.] (1994) Psychoanalysts Talk. New York: Guilford Press. Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books. Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in The Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books. Janik, A. & Toulmin, S. (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster. Janowitz, M. (1979) Bettelheim, Bruno. In Biographical Supplement to International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press. Jones, E. (1957) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: the Last Phase 1919-1939, Volume 3. New York: Basic Books. Jones, E. (1959) Free Associations. New York: Basic Books. Kaufhold, R. (1993) Rudolf Ekstein: ‘und meine Arbeit geht weiter.’ Psychosozial, 53: 43-53. Kaufhold, R. (1994) Annaherung an Bruno Bettelheim. Mainz, Germany: Grünewald. Kernberg, O.F. (2000) A Concerned Critique of Psychoanalytic Education. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81: 97-120. Kirschenbaum, L.M. (1989) Report of Dr. Bruno Bettelheim’s Presentation ‘How I Became A Psychoanalyst.’ Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin: Summer, 1989: pp. 3-8.
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Simmel, E. (1919) Contribution to Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses. In Freud, Standard Edition, 19: 3-43. London: Hogarth Press. Simmel, E. (1932) National Socialism and Public Health. Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin. Summer 1932: 17-26. Simmel, E. (1946a) Introduction. In Simmel, Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease. New York: International Universities Press. Simmel, E. (1946b) Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology. In Simmel, AntiSemitism: A Social Disease. New York: International Universities Press. Strachey, J. (1966) General Preface. Standard Edition, 1. London: Hogarth Press. Sutton, N. (1996) Bettelheim: A Life and Legacy. New York: Basic Books. Todorow, Tzvetan (1984) The Diological Principle. (trans. W. Godzich) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wallerstein, R.S. (2005) Rudolf Ekstein. Unpublished paper delivered at the Ekstein Memorial, New Center for Psychoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA, May 1, 2005. Wilson, S. (1990) An Interview with Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin: Spring 1990. Wittgenstein, L. (1921) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Zimmerman, D.P. (1994) Bruno Bettelheim: The Mysterious Other—Historical Reflections on the Treatment of Childhood Psychosis. The Psychoanalytic Review, 81(3): 411-450.
Index
Adaptation, adaptive mechanisms, 5, 27, 35, 49, 70, 121, 142 Adler, A., 65-66, 83, 106, 110, 111 Adler, F., 63, 86 Adler, V., 86 Adorno, T.W., 18, 43, 47 Affects, affectivity, 9, 60, 79, 122 Aggression, aggressive instincts, 83 Aichhorn, A., 10, 37, 65, 70-71, 87, 138 Allport, G., 33 Alexander, F., 141, 157 Allen, W., 17 Ambivalence, f., 2, 5-6, 9, 33, 38-40, 44-45, 59, 120, 122, 166 America, 1, 5, 9-11, 17, 24, 27, 43-44, 49, 57-59, 60-61, 67, 82-83, 108, 157, 159, 161, 167 American Imago, 45, 47, 85, 125 American Psychoanalytic Association, 5, 17, 28, 58-59, 121, 123 Americanization, 43, 121 Anniversary, 93, 102, 111, 120 Anschluss, 57, 143 Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic, antiJewish, 9-11, 31-46, 64, 7273, 83-84, 88, 106, 110, 111, 122, 139 Antifascism, antifascist, 9, 43, 55, 58, 63, 66, 124 Anxiety, 17, 20-21, 32, 38-39, 41, 5051, 69, 120-121, 132 Arendt, H., 19 Art, artistic, 1, 2, 4, 6, 24, 26, 28, 54, 67, 137, 142 Auschwitz, 18, 133 Austria, 2-3, 31, 58, 61, 63-64, 73, 8283, 109-111, 117, 140, 151 Austro-Marxism, 10, 62-65, 86 Autism, autistic, 6-8, 10, 20, 29, 51, 72, 74, 77-80, 87-88, 100, 143 Authoritarian, authoritarianism, 15, 34, 43-45, 47, 54, 60, 63, 77, 82, 151, 157, 160
Autobiographical, 23, 62 Autonomy, 3, 19, 29, 39, 42, 50, 52, 58, 82, 152-154 Bauer, O., 63 Beatles, 121 Beauvoir, S. de, 127-128 Beethoven, L. von, 139, 148 Bernfeld, S., 65-66, 68-69, 86, 123124 Berlin, 34 Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, 34 Bettelheim, B.: Concentration camp experience, 1, 19, 35, 83, 131, 133 Fairy Tales, 15-16, 20-21, 29, 53, 57, 117 Freud scholarship, 28 Friendships, 146 Personality, 2, 7, 9-10, 15, 31, 37-41, 60, 76, 143, 151-12, 155, 162 Suicide, suicidality, ix, 1-2, 9, 11-12, 38, 50, 84, 127, 134135, 147-149, 151-153, 161162 Treatment of children, 16 Writings: A Good Enough Parent, 10, 17, 20, 29 A Home for the Heart, 29, 77, 88 The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, 29, 74-75, 78, 81, 8788, 90 Freud and Man’s Soul, 4, 9, 12-13, 21, 27-29, 146, 153 Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays, 28, 147, 149, 153, 156, 170
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“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” 19, 28, 33, 46, 154 The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, 29, 154 Surviving and other Essays, 28, 46, 103, 154 Truants from Life: The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children, 29 The Uses of Enchantment, 17, 29 Bettelheim, E., 104, 148 Bettelheim, N., 110, 115, 117, 147 Bettelheim, R., 82, 113-116, 149 Bettelheim, T., 11, 73, 81, 84, 97-105, 111-113, 117 Bibring, G., 3 Bildung, 64 Biography, biographical, 1, 28, 61, 117 Bion, W., 74 Borderline, 10, 36, 74, 77, 80 Bornstein, B., 70 Buchenwald, 6, 18, 35, 50, 58, 131, 134 Buhler, C., 69, 113, 115 Buhler, K., 69 Buxbaum, E., 3, 70, 139 California, 34, 59, 82, 92-93, 95-99, 101-102, 104-106, 108, 110, 112-117, 120, 129, 145, 149, 159, 165-167 Camus, A., 145, 167 Carnap, R., 66 Catholic, 61, 63, 84, 105, 139 Chicago, 4, 5, 7, 15, 17, 51, 58, 74-75, 90-93, 95-98, 129-130, 140141, 143 Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, 5, 58, 141 Chicago, University of, 4, 7, 15, 50, 58, 92-93, 95-97, 130 Children, 1, 4, 6-11, 15-16,19-20, 41, 49-54, 57, 62, 64-65, 70, 7285, 90-91, 99, 105, 114, 127-
128, 130-131, 138, 140, 143, 149, 155-158 Christianity, Christian, 32-33, 35, 38, 40, 43,106 Clinical experience, clinician, ix, 4, 6, 11, 17, 19-20, 24, 26, 32, 3436, 43-44, 49, 57-60, 68, 7077, 81-83, 85, 90, 95, 120, 123-124, 140, 142-143, 146, 149, 151, 156-157, 159-160, 162-163, 166 Commentary, 162, 163 Communism, Communist International, Third International, 63 Concentration camps, 2, 6, 9, 11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 33, 35, 38, 49-51, 57-58, 76, 82-83, 110, 127, 131, 134, 146, 151-152, 155, 162 Conscience, 11 Conservatism, 45 Contemporary history, 16, 31, 155 Countertransference, 11, 20, 74, 82, 123, 157 Creativity, 15, 17, 52, 138-139, 148, 157, 161 Crowd psychology, mass psychology, 35, 43, 140 Cultural criticism, critics, 9, 17-19, 27, 44, 49, 159, 163, 167 Cultural history, 26, 122, 167 Dachau, 6, 18, 35, 50, 58, 131, 133134 Darnton, N., 159 Death instinct, death drive, 84, 134135, 151 Defense, defense mechanisms, 26-27, 39, 41-42, 79, 81, 133, 135, 140, 151 Demerol, 147 Depression, depressive, ix, 2, 9, 11, 20, 34, 50, 60, 84, 117, 128, 145-147, 150-152 Deuticke bookstore, 136 Dialogue, 3, 11, 16, 21, 31, 35, 44, 67, 77, 82, 84, 100, 122, 124, 145, 157, 161, 163 Early childhood, 2
Index Ego, 9, 25, 32, 36, 41-42, 134-135, 139-140 Ego Psychology, 17, 35, 43, 70-72, 121, 141-142 Eissler, K., 70, 157 Eisenhower, D.W., 33 Ekstein, C., 61 Ekstein, E., 61 Ekstein, R., ix, 9-12, 57-62, 64-85, 91, 93, 95-97, 99, 101, 105, 108, 112, 119, 120-125, 150, 159, 160, 162 Einstein, A., 40 Eliot, T.S., 28 Emancipation, emancipatory, 72, 124 Emotions, emotional, 1, 3-6, 9, 11, 2022, 24-25, 35, 37, 39, 51, 54, 60, 70, 145, 149-150, 155, 156, 158-160 Empathy, empathic, 3-4, 7, 10, 20, 23, 50-51, 53-54, 60, 62, 68, 77, 93, 156-157, 159-160 Empiricism, 67 Engagement, engaged, 6, 10-12, 22, 50, 67, 120, 150, 161 Enlightenment, 41-42, 44, 49, Envy, 8, 11, 82, 98, 162 Erikson, E.H., 1, 9, 33, 35, 37-38, 40, 43, 54, 123, 128 Extreme Situation, 19, 38, 51, 135 Fairy tales, 105, 125, 162, Fantasies, fantasy, 7-8, 20-21, 24-25, 37, 52-54, 60, 71, 74-75, 116, 135, 151, 157, 159 Fascism, fascists, 9-10, 20, 31-35, 4244, 63, 65, 69, 72-73, 83, 108110, 122, 140, 151, 152, 155 Federn, E., 35 Federn, P., 58, 137 Feigl, H., 66, Fenichel, O., 3, 9, 33-36, 39-40, 4344, 136, 146, 167 Fidelio, 134 Fisher, D.J., ix, 91, 165-167 Fitzgerald, F.S., 124 Frank, A., 15 Frankfurt School, 43 Free Association, 26, 122 French Revolution, 44, 63
177 Freud, A., 5, 10, 26, 40, 58, 65, 70-73, 123, 137, 140, 143, 157, 166 Freud, S., 1, 3-6, 8-9, 12, 15-18, 2128, 31-32, 34-35, 40, 42, 49, 51, 54, 58, 66, 69, 72-73, 84, 100, 102, 106, 110, 115, 124, 127, 136-138, 142-143, 145, 147, 156-157, 165-166 Friedlander, S., 151 Friedman, S., 96 Friendship, ix, 10-11, 57, 77, 84-85, 96, 109-110, 146, 150 Fromm, E., 33-35 Gandhi, M., 40 Gestapo, 19, 31, 152 Goebbels, J., 35 Ghetto, ghettoization, 6, 39-42, 44 Gitelson, M., 74 Goethe, J.W. von, 24, 73, 119, 124 Grotjahn, M., 123 Guilt, ix, 7, 11, 18, 40, 50, 53, 60, 80, 83, 131-132, 150-151 Hansel and Gretel, 74 Hartmann, H., 35, 70, 141-142, 157 Haupt, G., 167 Hegel, G.W.F., Hegelian, 63 Hemlock Society, 147 Hermeneutics, hermeneutical, 12, 21, 24-27, 155 Hilferding, R., 63 History of psychoanalysis, 17, 31, 54, 59, 85, 124, 140, 167 Hitler, A., 3, 33-38, 40, 43, 83, 106, 111, 140 Hitschmann, E., 58 Hoffer, W., 10, 69-71 Holland, 147-148 Hollywood, 130 Holocaust, ix, 1, 6-7, 9, 15-16, 18-19, 42, 44, 49-51, 54, 82, 84, 103, 131, 151, 155, 157-158, 161163 Hope, 72, 77, 109, 133, 151, 156 Humanism, 26-27, 41, 65, 156 Id, 25 Idealism, 134 Idealization, 8-9
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Identification with the torturers, identification with the aggressor, 39, 41, 43 Identity, 40, 42, 71, 124, 134, 139, 153, 162 Insane, insanity, 7, 36, 38, 127, 152 Intellectual history, 167 International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 166-167 Interpretation, 9, 11, 24, 31, 33, 43, 51, 60, 70, 80, 136, 150, 157 Introspection, 16, 44, 135 Intuition, intuitive, 3, 7, 54, 60, 76 Israel, 41, 42, 44, 163 Jatich, A., 161 Jew, Jewishness, ix, 2, 6, 10, 19, 3245, 58, 82-83, 106, 111, 122, 139 Jones, E., 23 Journalism, 15, 160 Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 19, 33 Jung, C.G., Jungians, 25, 110, 136 Kantian, 63 Klein, M., Kleinians, 59, 74, 157 Knowledge, 1-2, 7-8, 16, 22, 24, 27, 40, 54, 57, 61, 65, 67, 72, 79, 81, 110, 121, 124, 146-147, 152, 157, 159, 161 Kohut, H., 157 Kris, E., 35, 70, 138 Kris, M., 138 Kronengold, E., [Kronold], 58 Korczak, J., 155 Kreisky, B., 111 Lacan, J., Lacanians, 1, 23, 121, 167 Lagache, D., 23 Language, 5, 6, 16, 21-22, 25, 34, 52, 54, 60, 67-69, 73, 78-81, 84, 122, 145, 156 Lay analysis, lay analysts, 4, 10, 11, 15-17, 25-26, 44, 57, 59, 70, 73, 85, 123, 127, 138, 141, 146, 156 Leader, 36-37, 64-65, 76, 102, 108 LeBon, G., 35
Left, leftism, left-wing, 19, 32, 34, 4344, 65, 70, 82-83, 136 Lenin, N., Leninist, 63 Levi, P., 131, 133-134 Libido, 68 Loewenberg, P., 86 Loewenstein, R., 9, 33, 35, 38, 40-41, 44 Los Angeles, 11, 34, 59, 77, 82, 8485, 92-93, 95-97, 100-101, 114, 120-121, 123, 127-130, 146-147, 150, 162, 167 Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (L.A.P.S.I.), 59, 77, 146 Los Angeles, University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA, 95, 105, 149, 156, 167 Lueger, K., 83, 106 Luther, M., 40 Mach, E., 66, 106 Macdonald, D., 19, 33 Marx, K., Marxism, Marxist, 10-11, 34-35, 40, 43, 58, 62-66, 68, 82, 124, 157 Mass cultures, 5 Medicalization, medical training, medical model, 16 Menninger Foundation, 59, 74-75 Metaphysics, 63, 67 Mistranslations, 9, 22, 24 Mosse, G.L., 167 Motto, R., 77, 96, 99, 125 Music, 67, 134, 148, 149 “Muslims,” 132 Mystics, mysticism, 25, 110 Narcissism, narcissistic, 9, 22-23, 41, 43, 50-51, 54, 60, 105, 120, 128, 130, 148, 156 Nationalism, 41, 64 National Socialism, 9, 34, 58 Natterson, J., 167 Nazi concentration camps, 2, 6, 18, 49-50, 83, 146, 162 Nazi Party, Nazism, 32, 35-36, 42, 69, 83, 110 Neudorfer, E., 61 New York Review of Books, 18
Index New York Times, 18, 148 Newsweek, 12, 122, 159, 162 New Yorker, 18, 27, 166 Oberlauter, D., 84, 105 Object relations, 43, 59 Oedipus complex, Oedipal, 38, 43 Old age, 104, 111, 127, 128, 133, 150, 152-153, 161 Ornston, D., 166 Orthogenic School (Sonia Shenkman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago), ix, 4, 7-9, 12, 15, 20, 50-51, 55, 58, 75-78, 91-93, 95-97, 144, 161 Outsider, 4-5, 15, 18, 77 Over-determination, over-determined, 34 Parenting, parents, 6, 9-10, 20, 49, 51, 54, 78, 149, 156, 160 Paris, 167 Partisan Review, 158 Pessimism, pessimistic, 43, 110-111 Pflister, O., 15 Philosopher of psychoanalysis, 156 Piers, G., 141 Polemics, polemical, 6, 9-10, 12, 18, 27, 60, 66, 77-78, 84, 122, 161 Pollak, R., 12, 85, 88 Politics, 19, 33, Politics, 2, 43, 63-64, 83, 121, 148, 157 Power, 2, 6, 8, 17, 34, 36, 59, 76, 110, 120, 132, 134-135 Professionalization, 17 Projection, projective mechanisms, 8, 36-40, 43-44, 74 Psychoanalytic cultural criticism, 9, 15, 18, 27, 49, 163, 167 Psychoanalytic pedagogy, 57, 69-70, 72, 82 The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 75 The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 74 Psychoanalytic training, 3-4, 11, 16, 44, 57, 70, 122, 135 Raines, T., 12, 85
179 Red Vienna, 63, 66, 72 Regression, regressive, 19, 32, 39, 50 Reich, A., 3, 139 Reich, W., 35, 136-137, 139, 140, 157 Reik, T., 35, 123, 138 Reiss-Davis Clinic, 77, 92-93, 96-97, 99 Religion, religious, 9, 16, 21, 25, 32, 35, 38, 40, 43, 76 Renner, K., 63 Repression, repressive, 50 Resistance, 6, 15, 19, 42, 63, 66, 124, 140, 152 Rie, O., 138 Rimbaud, A., 161 Rimland, B., 10-11, 78, 79-82, 93 Roosevelt, F.D., 43 Rolland, R., 165, 167 Roth, P., 15 Russian Revolution, 52 Sartre, J.-P., 31, 167 Schlick, M., 10, 66-69, 72, 124 Schloss Tegel, 34 Schonerer, G. von, 83 Science, scientifically, 4, 10, 16-17, 21, 24-26, 40, 42, 54, 66-67, 79, 80-81, 142 Seitz, K., 63 Self-esteem, self-regard, 2, 5, 22, 39, 52-54, 62, 68, 119, 149 Sexuality, 2 Shame, ix, 7, 11, 40, 53, 60, 62, 131, 132, 134-135, 151 Simmel, E., 9, 33-36, 39-40, 43-44, 146 Sisyphus, 65-66, 69, 72, 123-124, 167 Socialism, Socialist Youth Movement (Wandervogel), 2, 9-10, 34, 44, 58, 62-66, 68, 72, 83, 110, 124, 136 Social democracy, Social democrats, 10, 34, 58, 62-65, 82 Society, 12, 162-163, 167 Society, 6, 19, 37, 40, 43, 54, 63, 65, 72, 83, 110-111, 130, 141, 143 Solomon, M., 113 Soul, 3, 9, 15, 21, 24-25, 28, 60, 70, 90, 111, 123, 156, 158
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Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, 59 Soviet Union, U.S.S.R., 63 Splitting, 36, 42-43 S.S., 39, 132 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition, 22-26 Sterba, R., 3, 4, 57, 127, 138-139 Strachey, J., 23, 26, 166 Stroke, 128, 145, 156 Suggestion, 34, 150 Suicide, suicidal, ix, 1-2, 9, 11-12, 38, 50, 84, 127, 134-135, 145, 147-149, 151-153, 161-162 Super-ego, 8, 25, 36, 38, 42, 80, 119 Sutton, N., 12, 85
Victim, victimization, 6, 19, 38, 4041, 51, 82, 135, 145, 151-152, 162 Viet Nam War, 82 Vienna, 2-3, 10-11, 20, 22, 32, 40, 5767, 69-73, 82-84, 98-103, 105-106, 108, 110-111, 114117, 121, 123-124, 127, 136138, 140-141, 143, 146-147, 150-151, 156-157, 159 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 3, 10, 57-58, 127, 136 Vienna, University of, 2, 10, 57, 64, 66, 69, 73, 84, 136, 155
Tandler, J., 65 Transference, 8, 39, 40, 74, 76, 123, 141, 157, 160 Trauma, traumatic, ix, 6, 10, 19, 33, 35, 38, 50-51, 60-61, 73, 151 The Times Literary Supplement, 18, 135
Waisman, F., 66, 68 Waelder, J., 70 Waelder, R., 70 Wallerstein, Robert, 61, 74, 125 Washington Post, 162 Williams, M., 147 Winnicott, D.W., 10, 49, 54, 74, 157 Wittgenstein, L. von, 67, 83, 100 World War I, 2-3, 34, 61, 69 World War II, 11, 32, 42-43, 73, 83, 159
Unconscious, 3, 7, 15, 20-21, 23-27, 32, 36, 38-39, 50-54, 66, 74, 76, 110, 122, 132
Zionism, 44 Zweig, A., 1 Zilsel, E., 64
Acknowledgements
Most of this book, with the exception of Chapters Five and Six, appeared in German as Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen. Essays uber Bruno Bettelheim [Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul: Essays on Bettelheim] (Psychosozial-Verlag: Giessen, 2003), introduced by Roland Kaufhold and Michael Loffelholz.
