Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy - Softcover

Sutton, Nina

3.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780813390994: Bettelheim: A Life And A Legacy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813390990 ISBN 13: 9780813390994

Publisher: Basic Books, 1997

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Who was Bruno Bettelheim? The brilliant discoverer of a unique method of treating psychotic children, justly acclaimed the world over? Or the brutal and despotic bully who was denounced after his death by former students and patients? In her quest to understand this puzzling and powerful man, Nina Sutton spent five years tracing Bettelheim's footsteps from Vienna to Los Angeles, via Chicago, Basel, and Jerusalem. She interviewed students and colleagues, friends and enemies, and uncovered rare documents, including Bettelheim's letters from Buchenwald and Dachau.Most significantly, he was a therapist driven by an almost magical idea: that from an absolute evil, Nazism, could be drawn the salvation of deeply disturbed children. Sutton shows how Bettelheim discovered his life force in the concentration camp and then tried to use his own aggression as a lightning rod for the self-destructive anger and violence seething within the children in his care. Probing deep into his past and into the scandal that broke out after his suicide, she reveals how care and brutality, commitment to truth, and a passion for fairy tales, could coexist in this exceptional man.

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Review:

Bruno Bettelheim was a legendary psychotherapist; a revered author of influential clinical studies on the lives of autistic children as well as popular Freudian interpretations of myth and fairy tale; and founder of the Orthogenic School of psychoanalysis in Chicago. Nina Sutton, an admirer of his work, found herself stunned by the "Bettelheim Affair"--the scandal that erupted after he killed himself in 1990, at the age of 86, when his reputation as a benevolent sage was besmirched by former patients who claimed that he had sadistically beaten them. Beginning her biography with an account of that scandal, Sutton proceeds to analyze the legacy of the man's work, relating it to his difficult life, and goes some way toward reclaiming Bettelheim's damaged reputation.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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