The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim

Author

PROLOGUE

In the fall of 1943, my brother entered the Orthogenic School, the home for emotionally troubled children at the University of Chicago of which Bruno Bettelheim would become director the following year. Stephen was six years old and I was nine, my preadolescent insecurities compounded by the resentment I often felt because of the extra attention he received from our mother. She tried to mollify me, to explain that Stephen needed this cosseting because, well, he just did, he was different. The Stephen of my memory is not different, he is a normal little brother with whom I roller-skated, ran our electric train, and, on Sunday mornings, while Bob and Janet Pollak tried to sleep, played orchestra, an exercise in which I stood on a chair and conducted our shellac recording of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony while Stephen sat and played imaginary instruments.

I eventually learned that he was, indeed, different, that he did poorly in school, was given to prolonged silences and frequent tantrums, and once lit a candle under our father’s bed. The words I most often overheard applied to him were autistic or retarded or backward, mysterious labels that sounded like an unbreakable code. Stephen began at the Orthogenic School as a day student, but Bettelheim soon insisted that he reside there. Over the months he made fewer and fewer visits home, becoming for me a kind of spectral sibling even before his death in 1948.

In the summer of that year, while he was on vacation from the school, we visited a farm in Cassopolis, Michigan, not far from our home in Chicago. Stephen and I were playing hide-and-seek in the loft of a barn when he slipped through an open chute camouflaged by hay and fell thirty-five feet, fracturing his skull on the concrete floor of the milking room, where our parents found him. In the days, months, and years to come, they dealt with their devastation by burying Stephen—his death as well as his difficult mental history—in a tomb of silence, in part because of their pain, but also because they believed that in sealing off the subject they were shielding their surviving child. When I was an adolescent, that was fine with me; I was more concerned—consciously, at least—with getting on with my own life than with exploring the family mausoleum. But as I grew older I began to want answers, to feel that the facts of Stephen’s short life, and its aftermath, might help explain aspects of my parents’ personalities I didn’t fully understand and illuminate corners of my own emotional life as well.

I put off this investigation for many years, until, in 1969, when I was thirty-five years old, I decided the time had come to go see Bruno Bettelheim. I did not tell my father of my decision; he had recently suffered a minor stroke, and though it had not left his body impaired he was deeply shaken psychologically, and I did not want to burden him further. I did tell my mother, albeit with considerable trepidation. It meant revealing my curiosity to her for the first time, and I had feared for years that bringing up the subject of Stephen might undo her. We were in the sunny living room of my parents’ Chicago apartment when I told her of my plan. She showed not the slightest emotion, as if I had just announced that I had an appointment at the dentist’s that afternoon. She sat on the sofa and quietly encouraged me, like a responsible mom who felt strongly that dental hygiene was important for her son. She said nothing about Stephen, nothing about Bettelheim; she simply said, in effect, Go, you have my blessing.

The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, as it is formally called, is housed half a mile from the block where I grew up in the university neighborhood of Hyde Park. In my youth, it was always That Place: a special institution with an ominous name whose meaning I did not comprehend, a bedlam of strange children, including Stephen. I walked past the home going to and from Hyde Park High School for three years after Stephen’s death. The buildings, a red brick former church and its rectory, did not look at all forbidding from the outside, and I often wondered what it would be like to go up to the big wooden door and ring the bell. Once inside, would I find a Dickensian nightmare; would the children crowd around and poke at me as if I were the freak? More important, would such a powerful and important figure as Bruno Bettelheim see me if I asked? And if he did, would he tell me what had been wrong with my brother, or was such information for grown-ups only?

Walking to my meeting on that June day in 1969, I felt almost as intimidated as I had in high school. In the nearly twenty-five years since Bettelheim had become director of the school, he had achieved an international reputation as a defender of and spokesman for mentally wounded children and, because of his incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, singular status as an authority on the psychological impact of the concentration camps. He had written three acclaimed books about his work at the school—Love Is Not Enough (1950), Truants from Life (1955), and The Empty Fortress (1967)—and just that spring had been called, in a typical encomium, one of Freud’s few genuine heirs of our time ... [a man who had] sought to think through all of human psychology for himself.¹ I entered his office not as an experienced, adult journalist, which I was, but as anxious supplicant looking for Stephen and not knowing quite how to begin.

Bettelheim was sixty-five years old, almost twice my age, and his heavy Viennese accent and the thick lenses of his glasses made him all the more formidable as he sat behind his desk and waved me to a chair. He did not invite small talk, so I fumbled right to the point by asking if I could look at Stephen’s records, explaining that this might help me frame more informed questions. He brushed aside the request, saying he wasn’t sure the school still had the file after twenty-one years and that, even if it did, I probably would not understand what was in it. He then leaned forward and asked me to vow that I would not discuss our session with my mother and father. This struck me as an odd request, but I was willing to abide by whatever ground rules he demanded if they helped me get the history I had come for. I told him this, and he immediately went on the attack.

My father he dismissed as crude and somewhat simple- minded, a schlemiel who paid the bills and stayed out of emotional problems. My mother was the villain. He said she paraded as a saint and a martyr when, in fact, she was almost entirely responsible for my brother’s problems. With astonishing anger, he said she had rejected Stephen at birth and that to cope with this lockout he had developed pseudo-feeble-mindedness. He said that my brother was a lovely child who manifested a sensitivity my mother wished she possessed, and he castigated her for never conceding that she was responsible for Stephen’s distress and for insisting, against the school’s wishes, that he be allowed periodic home visits. As his guttural assault filled the small room, I recalled how often my mother had cried after dealing with Bettelheim, her tears accompanied by bitter accusations that he hated her and, for that matter, all mothers. As these memories returned, I heard him saying, in particularly acid terms, that my mother had been under the sway of Mortimer Adler, a guiding force of the university’s Great Books project, where she had worked during some of the time Stephen was at the school. Adler has contempt for the emotions and is only interested in the intellect, he said, maintaining that, under the philosopher’s pernicious influence, my mother had yearned for Stephen to be successful intellectually, which he could not be at the time. "What is it about these Jewish mothers, Mr. Pollak?" he asked. I was stunned by this casual antiSemitism, coming as it did from a Jew who had suffered in the camps, and by the ferocity of his antagonism two decades after Stephen’s death. I had thought hard about my mother over the years, including during three years of psychoanalysis. I was under no illusion that she was Mrs. March, but I knew, too, that she was not the Medea of Bettelheim’s tirade.

Having demolished my mother, he went on to state, categorically, that Stephen had committed suicide. I timorously ventured to explain that Stephen and I had been romping happily in the hay and that I had nearly slipped down the loft’s hidden chute myself, but the director had long ago made up his mind. In 1956, I would discover, he had written that the school had warned my parents that a home visit for Stephen was ill-advised because he might harm himself. Despite our objection the visit took place . . . [and] the child died in a carefully contrived accident. ² Bettelheim told me with utter confidence that Stephen had once purposely fallen out of a speedboat near the propellers and that it was only a matter of time before he found a situation like the loft in which his efforts at killing himself would succeed. In fact, my brother had never fallen out of any boat. The day after he died, however, the eleven-year-old granddaughter of our host at the farm was thrown from a speedboat, and died after the propeller cut through her heart. I did not remind Bettelheim of this coincidence because, at the time of our meeting, I did not know of it, my ignorance yet another consequence of my parents’ determination to protect me as much as possible from the trauma of that grim August weekend.³

Over the years, I had tended to dismiss my mother’s complaints that Bettelheim hated parents as the understandable hyperbole of a woman who had given up her son to his care and the prolonged separations that required. Now I saw that, if anything, she had been understating his hostility. As I stared across the director’s desk, I could not comprehend his anger. We were meeting for the first time, I had come for help; yet he seemed determined to vent his spleen and draw me into a conspiracy against my mother. This world-renowned healer appeared interested only in wreaking vengeance on her more than two decades after Stephen’s death.

I am writing this nearly thirty years after the encounter, and it is fair to ask if I am not exaggerating, am not recalling Bettelheim in such critical terms because he bore such cruel tidings in such harsh tones. But I am not groping through the mists for these recollections. I left his office that day, walked back to my parents’ apartment, and immediately set down the details of the meeting in a letter to the psychoanalyst with whom I was no longer in treatment but with whom I planned to discuss the encounter. I still have the carbons of that summary, typed on the cheap yellow copy paper my father had used since his days as a newspaperman. I can feel the touch of his old Royal standard as I sat at his desk by the eleventh-floor window; I remember looking out at the Orthogenic School in the distance and thinking it the laboratory of the evil Doctor Sivana, arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel.

I was vague with my mother, telling her the meeting had been useful and sounding, no doubt, like a White House press secretary issuing an empty communiqué after a summit meeting. She did not press for more information but did say that if I wanted to talk about Stephen further I might find it helpful to contact a psychiatrist named Irene Josselyn, who had treated my brother in conjunction with the school. I scribbled the name down but did not mention that Bettelheim had drawn Josselyn into his net of fury also, attacking her for supporting Stephen’s home visits and accusing her of being more concerned with my mother’s emotional well-being than with my brother’s. I located her in Phoenix, Arizona, wrote to her describing my meeting, and put to her many of the questions I had tried to get Bettelheim to answer.

In two thoughtful replies, she attempted to deal with my queries. She said that her major difference with Bettelheim was over the cause of Stephen’s problems, which she did not feel could be blamed simply on my mother or father. Dr. Bettelheim, as you may know, has never been fond of parents! While I recognized that your mother was often over-anxious and also impatient with Stephen, and that your father made an adjustment to the situation by being somewhat aloof but patient, I could not see that they were reacting in a fashion that would explain why Stephen should show such early signs of maladjustment. . . . Your parents were always cooperative with me but I think were terrified in the presence of Dr. Bettelheim. It is my opinion that there is an inherent factor that we don’t understand in some of these cases; it may prove ultimately to be a genetic anomaly. . . . I am sure that your mother was not the Mammy" type, all-giving mother, but I always felt she was an average mother who did not as much reject Stephen as she felt frustrated in trying to react to him.⁴

Josselyn also disagreed with Bettelheim’s diagnosis that Stephen suffered from pseudo-feeble-mindedness. At that time, [1948] she wrote, our knowledge of childhood psychosis was very limited. [Stephen’s] general picture resembled what we then called schizophrenia. I suspect now [1969] we would call it Infantile Autism. Whatever the label, Josselyn had felt my brother was making more progress at the Orthogenic School than the director had. While at the time he died he was far from well, he was quite different from when I first saw him, she wrote. She also emphatically rejected Bettelheim’s view that Stephen committed suicide. She, it turned out, had been brought up around barns, where hay was fed through chutes to the cattle below. "I can recall very clearly, how we as children were warned that the chute might be covered with hay and it was a dangerous aspect of our playground! I felt Stephen fell down [the chute] accidentally. He, in my opinion, was not suicidal at the time."⁵

I welcomed Josselyn's supportive letters, but she was a woman I knew nothing about and had never met, even on the telephone. Bettelheim was the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, a man who had been widely recognized for his outstanding achievements, including by Chicago’s Immigrants Service League, when my father was its president, in 1961.⁶ A few months after our meeting, the leaders of the city’s political, business, and philanthropic community would gather in the grand ballroom of the Conrad Hilton Hotel to mark Bettelheim’s twenty-five years at the Orthogenic School and celebrate his rare ability to bring compassionate care to children and his immeasurable contribution to the understanding of human experience. ⁷ This did not describe the man I had encountered; what he had said to me, and especially the way he had said it, suggested quite the opposite.

It never occurred to me that I might attempt a biography of Bruno Bettelheim until an editor, Jennifer Josephy, suggested the idea after reading the first, tentative draft chapters of a memoir about Stephen that I began in the late 1980s. She found the material about Bettelheim and the Orthogenic School compelling and encouraged me to set aside the memoir temporarily to explore the possibility of writing about Bettelheim’s life and work. I was not at all sure I wanted to embark on such a long and arduous detour, and the memory of our meeting twenty years before gave me further pause, but I agreed to write to him.

He was living in Santa Monica, California, and a few days after he received my letter he called, apologizing for doing so and explaining that, as a result of two strokes, he could no longer use

pen or typewriter. He had just turned eighty-six, and the excoriating voice I recalled from 1969 was now hoarse and frail, made so, I would learn, by a recent throat operation. He was altogether cordial, saying that of course he remembered me, and talking— wistfully, it seemed—of Stephen. He asked if my parents were still alive; I said they were not, and he insisted that he, too, should be dead. When I offered some hollow response, like, Don’t be silly, he persisted, saying that he was old and sick and of no use to anybody anymore. Nonsense, I replied, and reiterated what I had said in my letter, that I would like to come out to talk about writing his biography. He paused for a long time, then said it would be foolish of me to fly all the way from New York to see someone who looked as grotesque as he did. Our conversation lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, during which he said he was too tired to cooperate with me and, besides, he was no fit subject for a book.

Though the prospect of attempting one without interviewing him made me even more hesitant, I began reading, or rereading, his books, and I was soon struck by the fact that his writing, for all its scrutiny of other people’s psychological behavior, revealed so little of his personal history. Nor was he forthcoming in private conversation, even with at least two of his three children; Naomi and Eric Bettelheim would tell me that he remained close-mouthed about his past all his life. [Ruth Bettelheim declined to be interviewed for this book. To honor Naomi Bettelheim’s request that I not invade the privacy of her present family, I have used her maiden name.] When a former student with whom he corresponded for several years asked him to tell her something of his early years, he dodged the question, replying that he always refused to cooperate with the few poor souls who wanted to write about him and made it a practice to destroy his papers and letters.⁸ To a would-be biographer, a Frenchman who made a television documentary about the Orthogenic School and its director in the early 1970s, Bettelheim wrote that he knew enough about his unconscious to wish to protect himself and his family from having aspects of it exposed to the public.⁹ Bettelheim’s literary agent, Theron Raines, and his personal editor, Joyce Jack, both urged him to put more of himself into Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays, his final and, putatively, most autobiographical book.¹⁰ He demurred, and in the introduction wrote that he eschewed such self-exposure because he believed that what Freud said about biographies applies even more to autobiographies, namely that the person who undertakes such a task ‘binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery.’ ¹¹

I don’t think biographers are doomed to break up on the shoals of Freud’s hyperbole, but truth was clearly a problematic issue for Bettelheim. In one of his final essays, Essential Books of One’s Life, he wrote that three of the thinkers who most influenced him as a young man were the German philosophers Theodor Lessing (1872-1933), F. A. Lange (1828-75), and Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933), and that at least part of their appeal lay in the encouragement they offered for not always hewing to the facts. From Lessing’s History as Projecting Meaning into the Meaningless, Bettelheim said he embraced the idea that the meanings of historical events are only the projections of man’s wishful thinking. Lessing had moved him to believe that fiction could play a role in ordering his life; or, as Lange put it in his History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Significance, to supplement reality by an ideal world of his own creation. This view was buttressed by Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of As If, a popular work that came out in 1911 and went through several editions. The renowned Kant scholar argued that even though fictions should not be mistaken for true propositions, they can work As If true. This demonstrated to Bettelheim the need and usefulness of acting on the basis of fictions that are known to be false, and left him with the conviction that we must live by fictions—not just to find meaning in life but to make it bearable. . . ¹² That Bettelheim might have encountered this pessimistic Lebensphilosophie at the University of Vienna in the 1920s was not surprising; it was then widely influential in German-speaking Europe, a strain of thought that owed much to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and held, generally, that because life had no real purpose it was made livable only by pretending through fictions that it did.

I knew nothing about Lessing, Lange, and Vaihinger, and when I went to The Encyclopedia of Philosophy to educate myself I found that Bettelheim had been there before me. His rendition of the three philosophers’ thinking drew significantly, both in language and structure, on the Vaihinger entry. Like Bettelheim, it described how Vaihinger expanded on Lange’s view that man needs to supplement reality. In the encyclopedia, Vaihinger is quoted as defining mankind as a species of monkey suffering from megalomania. Bettelheim used the same words, without the quotation marks. The entry recorded Vaihinger’s belief that it may be a great convenience to act as if the cosmos were orderly. . . .

Bettelheim turned this idea over to Lessing, writing that to proceed on the fiction that the cosmos is an orderly place is a great convenience.¹³ I was arrested by his reference to these three philosophers, and perplexed. Why had he chosen to bring them up at this eleventh hour? In mining the encyclopedia to the edge of plagiarism, was he trying to create an ex-post-facto intellectual scaffolding to rationalize a life of dissembling? Or was this the act of an ailing and despondent man who, contemplating his mortality, felt moved to offer, if not a full confession, then at least a tantalizing hint that his public persona had not been all that it had seemed? Many years earlier, he had written that lying leads to perdition but a voice used to repent, to admit our failures and state the truth, redeems us.¹⁴

I knew from my own experience that Bettelheim could be dogmatic, arrogant, and cruel, and over the years had heard, if only vaguely, that such behavior was not unknown beyond his interactions with my family. But I had never heard that he lied, and even after I read Essential Books of One’s Life and again recalled his claim that my brother had killed himself, it came as a surprise when, early in my interviewing, Benjamin Wright, a close colleague of Bettelheim’s in the 1950s, told me that he did so all the time. This assertion would be echoed often in the months to come. Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders, Bettelheim’s primary assistant and hand-picked successor at the Orthogenic School, said that you couldn’t believe anything he said. Jerome Kavka, a consulting psychiatrist at the school, told me one could never tell when Bettelheim was lying, and regarded him as a fictional artist. Josette Wingo, a counselor at the school in the late 1940s who also knew Bettelheim after he moved to California in the 1970s, said he concocted scenarios to fit the situation and that toward the end of his life he was making up stories about everybody.

Such assessments were sometimes less harsh judgments than indulgent winks that said, in effect, We’re on to this Baron Munchhausen. And some of Bettelheim’s tales did prove innocent enough, stories whipped up to make a point in the classroom, or the kind of stretchers that most of us tell once in a while, a phenomenon that in his native city is known as Wiener Schmäh, which loosely translates as blarney. But as my research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that Bettelheim had lived a life of As If that was frequently not so benign.

My interest in him grew when, on March 12, 1990, he took his own life.¹⁵ The date marked the fifty-second anniversary of the Nazis’ invasion of Austria, the Anschluss that had ripped thousands of Viennese Jews from their homeland and sent hundreds, including Bettelheim, to concentration camps. Was his timing just a coincidence? And what family history had pushed his only sibling, Margaret, to commit suicide in 1984? The enigma deepened further when, within a few weeks of his death, several former residents of the Orthogenic School publicly charged that he had abused them physically and emotionally, allegations soon supported by some former staff members.¹⁶ Then a scholar accused him of plagiarizing portions of The Uses of Enchantment, his widely read and much-lauded book about the psychological meanings of fairy tales.¹⁷ The charges, like Bettelheim’s suicide, surprised me and triggered more questions. Why had he so angrily compared the student antiwar protesters in the 1960s to young Nazis in the 1930s?¹⁸ And, more intriguing, why had he repeatedly, and often pugnaciously, accused the European Jews of ghetto thinking, of refusing to fight back against their anti-Semitic tormentors and thus aiding in their own mass destruction?¹⁹ Had Bettelheim fought back? Just who was he? I now felt impelled to find out.

In the pages that follow I have in general traced the chronology of Bettelheim’s life. But because he inhabited so many different roles, and because he often played them deceptively, I have stopped my forward march at several points to investigate specific areas, among them his concentration camp experience, his directorship of the Orthogenic School, his treatment of autistic children, his interest in kibbutz child-rearing, and his views on the Holocaust. In devoting full chapters to these subjects, and in pausing along the way to explore others, I have tried to focus on what was central in Bettelheim’s life without losing the sense of how that life unfolded.

Bruno Bettelheim often called his counselors participant observers, by which he meant that they had to be both deeply involved with and at the same time detached from the children in their care.²⁰ Any biographer is a participant observer in relating to his subject, and perhaps I am more than most. In the following pages, I have tried to keep my personal experience of Bruno Bettelheim from unfairly darkening my portrait; I have sought to be sympathetic yet aloof, involved yet not involved.²¹ If I have not arrived at the whole truth, I hope I have come closer to it than to flummery.

CHAPTER ONE: Vienna

Bruno Bettelheim wrote that the tales of his ancestors passed on to him by his parents left a deep impression on him as a child because they contained so many elements . . . of fairy tales. In these stories, his maternal grandfather left the small village where he was born soon after his thirteenth birthday, with a new suit on his back and only five guilders in his pocket. To protect his only pair of shoes, the boy walked barefoot the 100 miles from his village to the big city, Vienna. There, in a very hard struggle, he eventually managed to make a great fortune. His paternal grandfather was raised in a Jewish orphanage and educated to be a rabbi, his great intelligence soon catching the attention of the richest man in the realm, Baron Rothschild, who was seeking a tutor for his sons. The young rabbi took the post and went from living in desperate poverty into the grand palace of the Rothschilds, in Vienna. The Rothschild sons were so impressed by his learning and grew so attached to him that when they took over the family bank they put him in charge of many of its operations. As a result, he became extremely wealthy and a major force in Vienna’s Jewish community. Bettelheim wrote that it was not these true stories of his grandfather’s successes that made him believe the many fairy tales he knew but the fairy tales that persuaded him that the heroic oral histories of his forebears were based in fact.¹

The genesis of the name Bettelheim does have a fairy-tale aura. According to lore, it originated in the middle of the eighteenth century in what is now Bratislava, the Slovak capital on the Danube, about forty miles east of Vienna. Count Bethlen, one of the most powerful men in the community, so coveted the beautiful wife of a Jewish citizen that he rode into the marketplace and tried to kidnap her by lifting her onto his horse and galloping off. But her husband rushed to her rescue, fighting and vanquishing the count in hand-to-hand combat. That a Jew would confront, much less do battle with, a nobleman of such rank was so daring that the hero thereafter was known as Bethlen-Jude. When a royal decree required that all Jews assume family names, Bethlen-Jude became Bettelheim.

Whatever the accuracy of this story, a number of Bettelheim families did rise out of this region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.² One descendant was Marcus Bettelheim, who lived in Budapest, and whose wife, Lewia, gave birth to Jakob Moritz Bettelheim on December 12, 1825. By 1857, Jakob was living in Vienna, and soon married Eleonore Frankel, with whom he had eleven children. The fifth, Anton, was born on April 4, 1869, and would become Bruno Bettelheim’s father.³ The fairy tale of Jakob the orphan is just as fanciful as the one about Jakob the brilliant rabbinical student who tutored Nathan, Ferdinand, and Albert, the sons of the Vienna banker Anselm von Rothschild (1803-1874). Records in Vienna offer no evidence that Jakob ever entered the rabbinate or the Rothschild home as a teacher, or that he was employed in any capacity at the bank. He did, however, work for Albert von Rothschild. Jakob Bettelheim was by profession a Holzhandler, a trader in wood, and served as the banker’s Domanendirektor, the overseer of his agricultural and forest properties.⁴ The only Bettelheim who appears to have worked in the bank itself was Jakob’s eighth-born son, Bruno’s uncle Richard, who began employment there in 1902 and was the Prokurist, or head clerk, from 1913 to 1938.⁵

Bruno’s maternal grandfather was Adolph Seidler, the son of Abraham Seidler, a businessman, and Franziska Mühlrad. He was born on April 15, 1847, in Redschkau, a small town in Bohemia. He may or may not have still lived there when he turned thirteen, and may have walked barefoot to Vienna. However Adolph Seidler got to the imperial city, he eventually became a successful seller of sewing machines and owner of real estate, and in 1875 married Franziska Zentner. The couple had five children, one of whom, Rudolf, would establish a lumber business with Anton Bettelheim in 1907. By then, Rudolf Seidler’s sister Paula had been married to Anton Bettelheim for nine years.⁶ Their daughter, Margaret, was born late in 1899, and on August 28, 1903, Bruno Bettelheim arrived into a very sheltered existence and a life of greatest ease and comfort. ...⁷

Over the years, he sent out mixed signals about this life, and especially about his relationship with his mother. He wrote that he had a wet nurse whom he suckled into his third year, his mother being much too much the Victorian lady to breast-feed her children.⁸ Such arrangements were common among Viennese women in Paula Bettelheim’s social circumstances, as was the presence of maids and governesses. Her son said that he would probably have preferred it if his mother had nursed him,⁹ and his texts are full of passages stressing how important proper maternal breastfeeding is to the emotional well-being of children.

Still, the sketchy portrait he drew of his own mother in print is of an affectionate, devoted parent who read fairy tales to him, comforted him in her arms when nightmares woke him, took him to museums, and, especially, cared for him when he was ill. This was often, he said, for he was a sickly child who suffered from dysentery, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, and mumps, as well as several attacks of influenza and tonsillitis, which kept him in bed for many weeks at a time.¹⁰ Bettelheim said he almost died from eating poison berries, which caused such a severe reaction that he lived briefly in the home of the physician who treated him. He said that in later years, on trips to Europe, the smell of strong coffee always reminded him of this crisis, because the doctor had made him drink it as a stimulant.¹¹ During the many nights when he was seriously ill at home, Bettelheim wrote, my mother sat at my bedside, sponging my feverish body and changing the cold compresses to give me relief. In moments like these I learned to understand and appreciate that a mother makes all the difference in the world when one is in need, in great pain, deeply worried, or even desperate.¹²

Bettelheim’s behavior as an adult suggested that he felt a good deal more hostility toward his mother than he cared to record in print. No prominent psychotherapist of his time was as antagonistic to mothers—in private and public—as he was, insisting that they caused autism by rejecting their infants and comparing them

to devouring witches and the SS guards in the concentration camps. Throughout his life he said that his own mother had not taken good care of him, leaving him in the charge of the wet nurse or a nanny; he complained that his mother had too often been busy embroidering to pay him the attention he craved. In the 1950s, he spoke to the Paul Federn Study Group, a gathering of therapists in New York City, about his work at the Orthogenic School; when a colleague who also treated disturbed children politely challenged Bettelheim’s hostile view of mothers, Bruno exploded and started to scream, ‘I had no mother,’ recalled a friend, who told me he behaved like a paranoid.¹³ Years later, Bettelheim would appear at a professional meeting in Philadelphia and, during a question-and-answer period, say that some women are just not fit to be mothers and that his was one of these; he also reiterated what he had said in a recent interview: that he saw no reason why we cannot make provision for children to divorce themselves from their families, as adults divorce one another.¹⁴

As a boy, Bettelheim did something of this sort by spending many afternoons after school at the home of his mother’s sister, Jeanette Buxbaum, who lived near the Bettelheim apartment. He sought refuge at the Buxbaums’ primarily to avoid his sister, Margaret, whom he regarded as an intrusive know-it-all. Such [escapes] were possible in the old extended family, where the bad aspects of brothers and sisters who grated on you and the authoritarianism of parents were diluted by the nearness of other relatives. . . .¹⁵ He said that during these years his aunt Jeanette had a greater influence on him than his mother, but he did not reveal in his writing what that influence was. Another attraction at the Buxbaums’ was their only daughter, Edith, who was a year older than Bruno and became his favorite cousin; they were more like brother and sister and spent hours helping each other with schoolwork. Edith Buxbaum, who would become a leading psychoanalyst in Seattle, saw her aunt Paula not as a remote mother but as a woman who spoiled her son by smothering him with affection.¹⁶

The memories Bettelheim chose to set down in his books about his preadolescent years reveal few tensions with either of his very good parents.¹⁷ He wrote of playing happily under the big

dining-room table with his cousins, eavesdropping on the grownups’ conversation as they pressed their knees against the tablecloth that hung almost to the floor.¹⁸ He fondly recalled kibitzing at his father’s card games, and playing cards himself with Anton for long hours on rainy vacation days.¹⁹ He said that, when he was six years old, a four-story house across the narrow street from their apartment burned down in the middle of the night and Anton and Paula woke him so he could see the spectacle. [T]hey were calm and talked with me about the varying colors and forms of the flames. . . . The security which I felt emanating from my parents . . . had kept me from feeling any fear.²⁰ Bettelheim stressed that he was never punished, describing how on one occasion he had shocked his mother by using offensive language to express his irritation with her. His father was upset when she told him of this transgression and asked his son if he really had to punish him to get him to speak respectfully to his mother. The idea that he might have to punish me obviously distressed my gentle father, and that, Bettelheim wrote, was enough to cure him forever of using bad language in front of his parents.²¹

In 1914, when Bruno was eleven years old, his formal education began at the Realschule on the Albertgasse, a few blocks from his home. Over the next seven years, he took intensive instruction in German, French, English, mathematics, physics, and much else that rounded out the demanding curriculum, one that Vienna’s schoolmasters taught with the strictest discipline. Bettelheim described himself as a very good student, a quiet, introspective, even subdued youngster.²² In his first year, he was one of five pupils in his class of fifty-four to be singled out for excellence. In his final year, 1921, his marks ranged from good to superior; he was praised for his deportment and did not miss a single day of school, reflecting a dedication to hard work that would last a lifetime. During these school days, Bruno also was singled out for his writing skills by Moritz Bauer, the rabbi who provided religious instruction to the Jewish pupils at the Realschule.²³ Most of the other teachers were Catholic, nationalistic, and, in many cases, anti-Semitic bastards,²⁴ as were some of his classmates. Bettelheim told of a friend with whom he walked to school every day but who one morning hit him because the Jews had crucified

Jesus. There were the boys who extorted money: who beat us if we handed it over because we were dirty cowards, and who beat us if we didn’t, because we were miserly Jews.²⁵

The most detailed anecdote Bettelheim recorded about his school days turned on a teacher he chose to call Dr. X, a simpering fool who spoke with the voice of a eunuch. So weak and inadequate was this schoolmaster that one day Bruno egged on several of his classmates and together they bodily removed the offending instructor from the room. Bettelheim recalled that he immediately began to tremble as he contemplated the consequences of this rash act; and, indeed, the next day the school’s authoritarian director castigated the class, and especially Bruno, as the leader in this unprecedented and nefarious deed. But the director did not, as the troublemaker feared, expel him. On the contrary, at the end of the scolding his demeanor suddenly softened, and, in a quiet voice, he said: Of course I know that if Dr. X had behaved as I expect all masters of this institution to behave, nothing like this could have happened. He then merely ordered Bruno to stay after school for two hours and study the subject Dr. X should have made so compelling that no rebellion would have occurred. Bettelheim wrote that this experience made a deep impression on him and stayed vividly in his mind for more than six decades, yet he did not name the director or Dr. X, or describe what subject the teacher was presiding over so ineffectively.²⁶

Whether this scenario is true or not, Bettelheim almost always employed such tales to make a point, and he extrapolated two from the story of Dr. X. In his maturity, he came to realize that the director, in acting as he had, had manifested the requirements of an incisive educator, one who examines the motives of a child so as to comprehend the reasons for his or her behavior. Also many years later, he came to understand what had moved him to such an atypical outburst. We boys, Bettelheim wrote,

were at an age when we had anxious doubts about our budding masculinity and needed suitable masculine figures with which to identify. Dr. X, far from offering a suitable image for identification, increased our anxieties that we might not make it as male adults; he presented us with our worst fears about ourselves—and in the flesh.

Bettelheim said that he was fifteen years old when this incident took place, and that he acted as he had because his father had recently suffered a stroke, which made him fear that he might grow up to become a weakling like Dr. X.²⁷

Anton Bettelheim may, in fact, have suffered a minor stroke when his son was a teenager, but the severe illness that so distressed young Bruno was syphilis, which Bettelheim told at least two people his father contracted in 1907, when his son was four.²⁸ Bettelheim speculated that his father developed the disease one summer when his mother, like many wives of successful businessmen, had gone off to the mountains, leaving her husband in Vienna to work. He did not think his father habitually visited prostitutes, but felt he must have done so on this one occasion.²⁹ The disease afflicted Anton at a time when fear of the venereal plague had reached a peak, because of its spread among the troops during the Great War. Despite advances in treatment during the first years of the century—the universal blood-serum test discovered by Wassermann and Neisser in 1906, the development of the drug Salvarsan in 1909—a certain cure would not be found for this ugly, highly contagious infection until penicillin stopped the killer spirochete in 1943. Like AIDS, syphilis brought with it a numbing sense of doom and a cruel social stigma; also like its counterpart, it could flow quiescent in the bloodstream for many years.

Once Anton Bettelheim’s syphilis was diagnosed, Paula did not have sex with him for the rest of his life—two decades, if the 1907 date of onset given by their son is correct. The atmosphere of the family’s apartment at Neubaugasse 66 was melancholy, and Paula, though charming and welcoming, did not always hide the weight of her conjugal frustrations.³⁰ Edith Buxbaum recalled that the poor woman knew that her husband had an ineffective anti-syphilis treatment and waited for years for something terrible to happen.³¹ Decades later, Bruno would tell his own children that as a young boy he did not know what caused the oppressive climate in his home but a fear that he may have created it caused him great anxiety about his own sexuality, an insecurity that made him back away from intimate encounters with the girls who attracted him.³²

Eventually, Bettelheim did learn the cause of his parents’ anguish and began to worry because he did not know whether he was conceived before or after [his father contracted] the infection. ³³ He feared that he might be what then was called a heredo, that his physical defects and awkwardness might somehow be the result of syphilis and that much worse might be in store, such as blindness. Bettelheim’s blue eyes coped behind thick glasses with a nearsightedness that he loathed. As an adult, he would recall that his parents and the family’s eye doctor told him that his glasses fully corrected his vision. I believed them because I had no way of knowing how other people see. I tried to play tennis and what not, like other kids, but I was always poor at it and felt pretty bad about myself. It wasn’t until I was well into my forties before my eye doctor said, ‘Look, even with the best correction I can give you, you have about a 30 to 40 percent loss of vision.’ ³⁴ Mariam Williams, a psychoanalyst Bettelheim saw for about a year at the end of his life, told me that he also was very unhappy about his looks, seeing in the mirror an image with large ears, a big nose, and thick lips that his boyish smile did not erase. This sense of being homely dogged him throughout his life, even at moments of great triumph. In accepting a National Book Award in 1977 for The Uses of Enchantment, he couched his remarks as a fairy tale and told his audience that his mother

had a healthy, down-to-earth sense of reality. So when right after his birth her son was shown to her, she took in his appearance carefully and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. Thank God, she said, it is a boy.

Now this mother told her children many fairy tales. And since they lived at the most remote edge of the German land, she told the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, not those of Hans Christian Anders[e]n. Thus the boy never got the idea that an Ugly Duckling could turn into a beautiful Swan. This was fortunate, and saved him from disappointment, because his looks remained very much the same as they had been when his mother first beheld him.³⁵

Medical logic dictated that Bruno was in no danger of inheriting syphilis; it is congenital, and Paula Bettelheim never had the disease. As with AIDS, however, the terror did not come only from the scientific facts. Moreover, Bruno received scant reassurance from Freud, whose work he said he began reading as a teenager. In A Case of Hysteria, Freud wrote that the father of his eighteen-year-old patient Dora had contracted syphilis before his marriage, adding that "a strikingly high percentage of the patients whom I have treated psycho-analytically come of fathers who have suffered from tabes or general paralysis. Thus, he concluded, syphilis in the male parent is a very relevent factor in the aetiology of the neuropathic constitution of children."³⁶ The specter of his father’s illness so traumatized Bettelheim that on the rare occasions when he managed to talk about it he often could not bring himself to say the word. At age eighty-three, he wrote to a friend of the deathly disease, of which [Anton] knew he would die. This projected him and my mother into a state of deep anxiety which was not lost on my sister and me. . . . From this moment on the life of my parents was a nightmare for them which they kept hidden from everybody, even their parents and siblings. But they suffered quietly.³⁷

Books and movies were the solace of the insecure teenager living in the shadow of his father’s illness. At first he soaked up escapist fare, such as Karl May’s popular adventures set in the American West, and The Perils of Pauline, which he saw at movie palaces like the Apollokino or the Buschkino, where an orchestra played for fifteen minutes before the films began. These diversions, he said, helped him forget for a few hours the realities of World War I, which quickly turned prosperous Vienna into a shabby, hungry city awash in refugees. The war was rough even for the well-to-do, Bettelheim said. We never had enough heat or enough light or enough food. He described how, when he was fourteen, he helped unload wounded soldiers from trains coming in from the front and take them to hospitals, and how he later helped disarm some of these men so they wouldn’t pillage the city.³⁸

By the war’s end, in 1918, an influenza epidemic was sweeping the world. It would take the lives of twenty million people, among them such notable Viennese as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, whose Secessionist revolt against academic painting had revolutionized art in Vienna and beyond; Otto Wagner, who had led architecture away from the hodgepodge grandiosity of the buildings that had risen along the Ringstrasse in the second half of the nineteenth century; Sophie Freud, Sigmund’s middle daughter; and Victor Adler, leader of the Social Democrats, who died just as the Austrian republic was aborning. Emperor Franz Joseph, who had ruled Austro-Hungary since 1848, had died of old age two years earlier. In the late fall of 1918, just after Bruno turned fifteen, the old Habsburg Empire fell apart, like the downfall of a manorial family that, after living in comfort for generations, faces poverty and must subsist on dry bread and potatoes amid the faded splendor of their now unheated residence while their former retainers and tenants take over the bulk of the estate.³⁹

This upheaval must have affected Anton’s lumber business to some extent, but his son said that enough money remained after the war for the family to resume a comfortable life.⁴⁰ Still, he would write of how hard it was for him as a teenager to revolt against parents whose ordered world had been shattered by the war and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many times Bruno had seen Franz Joseph, resplendent in bemedaled uniform and muttonchops, waving to the crowds as horses pulled his carriage through the cobblestone streets. Now the patriarchy he had presided over for almost seventy years was withering away; Bruno said that he began to see that his own father, whom he had regarded as an oppressive but protective hero, was just a clay god,⁴¹ and that he could no longer test his emerging values against those of his parents, because he now found theirs so lacking. Perhaps this was the vacuum that Jeanette Buxbaum and her daughter Edith helped fill when young Bruno retreated to that household after school, but it seems as likely that behind all the talk of values lay what Bettelheim would one day call the time bomb⁴² of his father’s syphilis, which was ticking ever closer to its fatal explosion.

Anton Bettelheim died on April 13, 1926, the official causes listed as tabes, progressive paralysis, a weak heart, and encephalopathy.⁴³ His son left no doubt in private conversation that the final stage of his father’s illness had been horrible to see.⁴⁴ Anton had been able to go to Bettelheim & Schnitzer, his lumber business, and maintain outward appearances until a few months before the

end. Bruno and his mother and sister nursed him first at home and then at a sanatorium in the town of Tulln, a few miles northwest of Vienna, watching as he wasted away. He was fifty-seven, his widow forty-eight, his daughter twenty-six, his son going on twenty-three; it was much too early for me, Bettelheim wrote sixty years later.⁴⁵

At the time of his father’s death, Bruno had been enrolled at the University of Vienna for ten semesters, concentrating in art history. But because of his father’s illness he also had made preparations for a business career. In 1921, the year he had entered the university, he simultaneously began courses in international commerce at the Hochschule fur Welthandel on the Franz-Klein-Gasse. Over two semesters, he studied a prescribed curriculum that included courses in bookkeeping, commercial law, and economics and passed the required final exam on July 19, 1922.⁴⁶ With this grounding, he had worked at the lumber yard part time, but now he reluctantly dropped out of the university to assume his responsibilities full time, in tandem with his father’s partner, Hanns Schnitzer. Bruno and his mother suspected Schnitzer of having cheated Anton, disdained his middle-brow tastes, and regarded him as a social inferior; moreover, the erstwhile student had little enthusiasm for the