Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim - Hardcover

Raines, Theron

9780679401964: Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679401962 ISBN 13: 9780679401964

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

In 1983, after years of trying to persuade Bruno Bettelheim to write his autobiography, Theron Raines, his friend and literary agent, himself undertook to tell the life of the renowned but often controversial child psychologist. With no thought of writing a conventional biography, Raines began a series of interviews in which Bettelheim reflected at length upon the major moments—triumphs, crises, and tragedies—of his extraordinary life. Rising to the Light is the fascinating synthesis of these encounters and of Raines’s interviews with counselors, teachers, and former students from the world-famous Orthogenic School.

Here is Bettelheim’s sudden passage from a life of wealth and luxury in Vienna to the appalling brutality of Dachau and Buchenwald, where his intellect helped him survive the horrific conditions that often broke down a prisoner’s personality. His understanding of the parallels between the extreme situation of a concentration-camp prisoner and the inner world of a disturbed child would shape him as a therapist. Here is his voyage from the Old World to the New, and his professional ascent in Chicago, where he developed a total therapeutic milieu for children unable to survive emotionally at home or in any other school. Though he had no specialized training, he was uniquely qualified by his uncanny insights into children and his deep Freudian and post-Freudian convictions about human nature and behavior. Based on his success as a clinician and teacher, he would go on to become a best-selling author. But toward the end of a long life, Bettelheim would succumb to a stroke and to a devastating depression intensified by his feelings of uselessness when he was no longer able to do the work that had been his daily salvation for so many decades. Raines, who visited him twice in his last weeks, also gives us the days just before the puzzling suicide of this man who had endured and built so much.

Despite his demonstrably tireless commitment to children, Bettelheim’s reputation was blemished after his death by attacks on his writings and his unorthodox clinical methods, in particular his use of physical discipline in the psychotherapeutic setting. Raines’s conversations with Bettelheim have much to tell us about this bitterly disputed aspect of his legacy, and they reveal a complex man who had to explore the boundary between compassion and brutality.

Rising to the Light is a portrait of a great teacher; it gives us a more direct line of sight into the Bettelheim enigma than any other book is likely to provide.

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About the Author:

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Theron Raines served in the air force as a navigator; later, he earned degrees from Columbia College, Columbia University, and Oxford University. He has been a literary agent for many years, and his distinguished client list has included, apart from Bruno Bettelheim, James Dickey, Winston Groom, Raul Hilberg, Willie Morris, and Cynthia Ozick.

CHAPTER 1

Young Bruno--Infancy, Background, and Early Adolescence

In 1980 my wife and I were having dinner at the apartment of a prominent analyst, and in the course of conversation he said, "I want you to hear something by your friend Bruno." The analyst knew that I represented Bettelheim, who at that point had been a client for about ten years. After dinner our host played an audiotape made several years earlier at a conference where Bettelheim was a featured speaker. Bruno had begun with a story of his infancy and early childhood, material well suited for an audience of analysts and other professionals. In the speech he revealed that like many children in his time and circumstances, he had been reared by a wet nurse.

In speaking personally Bettelheim sounded modest, confessional, and charming, and yet I detected notes of impudence and irreverence as he began to imply a disagreement with conventional psychological attitudes toward raising children. He made the wet-nurse episode sound scandalous, an outrageous way of treating an infant. However, since the product of this upbringing, a genuine celebrity, was standing there on the podium in a sober business suit, speaking with a heavy Viennese accent, with an innocent manner and an artless delivery, the audience murmured at some remarks, laughed at others, and sent him off at the end with a good round of applause. (1)

After we listened to the tape, our host (also Viennese but younger than Bettelheim) said thoughtfully and perhaps a bit wistfully, "We [the psychoanalytic establishment] should have reached out to him and taken him in. We shouldn't have left him isolated all those years." I believe the sentiment was genuine, and I know it was remarkably generous, because Bettelheim had written a damning review of this man's book a few years earlier.

When I interviewed Bettelheim three years later, I asked him to tell the wet-nurse story again, and he obliged. "First, I think it has an important lesson, because my mother was a very Victorian lady. But she was also enlightened for her time and quite cultured, and she had every intention of being a good mother. On the one hand, it would not have occurred to her to do something as vulgar as to breast-feed her children, but on the other hand, she would never deprive her infants of being nursed at the breast. So, when I was almost ready to be born--this was in the summer of 1903--she made inquiries to find a wet nurse. In Vienna these were girls from the country, young girls from the farm. They were examined by doctors to make sure they were clean and healthy. Naturally, one such wet nurse was found for me, someone who would be on hand from the moment I was born.

"Now, what were the qualifications of such a wet nurse? Firstly, she had to have an illegitimate child. Most girls who had children born out of wedlock were hired as wet nurses. So we start out with a girl who is a 'sex delinquent,' if we use the kind of term you find in textbooks. But not only is she a sex delinquent, she is so deprived of all natural motherly instincts that she leaves her own child behind on the farm for somebody else to take care of, and she goes to the city for purely monetary gains.

"But that was not all: everyone believed that a wet nurse should drink a lot of beer in order to have a good supply of milk, so my wet nurse--like all of them--was encouraged and advised to drink beer. While she wasn't necessarily an alcoholic, most of the time she was slightly inebriated. So my entire care for the first three years of my life--because that was how long a wet nurse stayed with her job (of course, there was supplementary feeding, too)--was entrusted to a not particularly well educated and rather uncultured teenager of questionable morals who was also a sex delinquent, however you want to call it, and a person devoid of natural motherly instincts, with a tendency toward alcoholism."

When he was speaking to a psychologically oriented audience, at this point in the story Bettelheim summed up his case: he shrugged helplessly and said, "So you see the result," and everyone burst out laughing. However, there was more to the story as he told it to me.

"That girl, of course, was anxious to preserve her employment as long as possible, so she had no interest in weaning the child. Also, the child must seem to thrive, he shouldn't cry too much, should sleep well, should grow appropriately. In other words, he should develop normally and with a minimum of anxiety and trouble for the mother. Since the nurse knew she had to keep the child happy, whenever he cried, a typical wet nurse would sexually stimulate the baby to quiet him down. And this certainly made him happy."

I interrupted: "You may be describing the perfect childhood."

"That's what I'm trying to say," Bettelheim replied. "Why? Why did she do that? It's really very simple. While these girls were paid by present standards what we would call a pittance, or barely a pittance, the arrangement was, if she did a good job and the baby developed well, that at the end of the nursing period she would be given a fairly large sum of money as a dowry. That made up for her small wage and at the same time assured that she would take good care of the child. And out of this dowry, she could then go home and buy a little farm and marry the father of her own child, or even somebody else. That was the customary arrangement, but in my case it didn't work out that way, because Mitzi didn't want to go back to the farm or to take care of her child. I don't know, maybe the child died. Interestingly, I never asked. But she married an upholsterer and bought him a shop, and they lived in Vienna. I kept in touch with her as long as I was in Vienna. Naturally, I was very attached to her.

"But why did it work? Why did this 'outrageous,' if you go by the textbooks, system work so well? First, there were no distractions for a wet nurse. She concentrated strictly on the infant. She didn't have to take care of the house, she didn't have to cook, she didn't have to clean--all the tasks we think of as 'mother's work.' She only had to care for the infant and see that he was healthy. That was all, that was it.

"She didn't care about world politics, she didn't care if I went to college or whether I learned to talk early, or how soon I learned to walk. She wanted only that I should nurse well and not cry too much, that I should develop well in general. She had a vital interest in those elements of my life up to the age of three--her whole future depended upon it! Her attention made me happy, and it made my parents happy, and the result made Mitzi happy. Nobody talked about delinquency or about rehabilitating anybody, but Mitzi became a good citizen, very responsible, and when she married she had five children, who she naturally brought to see us. It was a good arrangement."

But wouldn't he really rather have been nursed by his mother?

"Sometimes I think I might have liked it better, but then I know that this couldn't be true in reality because my mother didn't want to, and if she did the nursing only out of a sense of duty, which she would naturally resent, then it wouldn't have been good for either of us.

"Incidentally, I don't believe the British nanny was nearly as good an arrangement for children, because she was much too concerned that the child should be 'decent.' Farm girls in Austria, maybe you would think they were oversexed drunken immoral teenagers, but thank god they were not concerned with 'decency' or anything rigid like that. These girls had only a concern that the child should be happy and that their masters and mistresses should be satisfied."

Was there any danger that the wet nurse would take the mother's place?

"No, I knew who was my mother from an early age. Practically every day my sister and I were brought in to play with her, at least that's how I remember it from the age of two. And during this hour or two (at the most) that we were with our mother, she played with us and wasn't distracted by anything else. She enjoyed us fully at that moment, which is important. It's amazing, but a French study I read when I was writing the book on the kibbutz showed that mothers who were all day at home actually spent only about two hours with their children. So you see, maybe there's a natural limit to how much you can be interested in a baby, or how much time you can spare from other tasks. Most of all, our mother could enjoy the time with us because it was limited time. When we became restless, there was a sacred formula my mother used--as many other mothers did, I'm sure. She said, 'I guess the little darling is getting tired,' which meant, 'I want to get rid of him now.'

"Then Mitzi took us back to the nursery, where we would be rambunctious or do whatever we wanted. So we had a marvelous time with our mother, nothing but play. It was usually teatime, and we had some cookies or other goodies, and we were played with. My mother had no need to criticize or reprimand us. That was done by the nurse, but because she was a servant we could take it or leave it. The nurse was not as powerful and important to us as the parent. Remember, in Shakespeare, it's Juliet's nurse who takes care of her and indulges her, makes it possible for her to be with Romeo. But all this was only possible in a servant culture.

"Psychologically, the most important thing of all was that the criticism and reprimanding was not done by the all-important person, the parent. All the petty education was from the servant, and the parents were reserved for really major issues. The child was superior to the servant and soon realized it. Also, there was a much freer atmosphere in the servants' quarters of the house. This was not a nuclear family as we think of it now, but it was a very strong family, and the child knew his place in it. Yes, it was very reassuring, very secure."

Bettelheim told me that his family name dated b...

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