Background
Bettelheim was born in Vienna, Austria, on Aug. 28, 1903 to a middle-class Viennese family.
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(In 1938-39, Bruno Bettelheim was imprisoned in the concen...)
In 1938-39, Bruno Bettelheim was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. In order to keep alive and remain human, he began to analyze his own behaviour and that of everyone around him. This book is a record of those years.
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Bettelheim was born in Vienna, Austria, on Aug. 28, 1903 to a middle-class Viennese family.
He studied art history, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Vienna.
His interest began when a girl he liked was impressed by an older boy, who knew about Freud’s ideas. Bettelheim determined to study the subject by himself and became so entranced that he later reported walking down the street where Freud lived “only because Freud lived there.”
He continued studying psychology and became particularly interested in autistic children, who suffer from a little-understood disease that causes them to withdraw into their own worlds, communicating little, if at all, with others. Believing that autistic children could be reached, he took an afflicted child into his own home in 1932, in search of successful therapy. The experiment was abruptly ended in 1938, shortly after Bettelheim received his doctorate from the University of Vienna, because of the occupation of Austria by the Nazis. Bettelheim was arrested and taken to Dachau, and later transferred to Buchenwald.
After spending over a year in the camps, Bettelheim was released due to intervention by Eleanor Roosevelt and New York Governor Herbert Lehman. He arrived in the United States in 1939 and began working as a research associate in the Progressive Education Association at the University of Chicago.
Four years later, he attracted considerable attention, when he published an article entitled “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” which recalled his experiences in the concentration camps.
Bettelheim was living in a nursing home when he took his own life on March 13, 1990, on the fifty-second anniversary of the date the German army had invaded Austria.
In 1944 he was appointed assistant professor of psychology and head of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. Bettelheim turned the center into a total “therapeutic milieu,” administering therapy as an all-day experience in a completely supportive environment rather than at isolated treatment hours. The children in his center lived in plush surroundings and ate from china plates. The doors of the school were locked to the outside, but always open from the inside. Although his claim of an 85 percent cure rate, defined as a full return to participation in life, has been challenged, there is no doubt that he set new standards in the treatment of severely emotionally disturbed and autistic children.
(In 1938-39, Bruno Bettelheim was imprisoned in the concen...)
Bettelheim related the extreme distress he and other victims suffered in Nazi concentration camps to the pain suffered by emotionally disturbed children. His views on the Holocaust, however, were considered controversial. Bettelheim held Jews partially responsible for their own fate at the hands of the Nazis because of what he called “ghetto thinking.”
He said Diaspora Jews had long been trained into a docility and compliance, which usually allowed them to survive in alien cultures. The Jews who marched “like lemmings” to the death camps were permitting themselves to be punished, not for what they did but for who they were, and this, Bettelheim concluded, meant that they were already “dead by [their] own decision.”
Later in a 1976 article, “Surviving,” he wrote that those who survived the death camps were able to do so because they believed in some cultural or religious ideal that helped them transcend themselves.
He was married to Regina Alstadt (1930–?; divorced) and Gertrude Weinfeld (1941–1984; died)
