Odd Hysteria

By Otto Friedrich

FREUD'S VIENNA AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Bruno Bettelheim

Knopf; 284 pages; $22.95

Psychoanalysts tend to believe that nothing happens by accident, so Bruno Bettelheim has a theory about why psychoanalysis, and indeed "all modern methods of treatment for mental disturbances," first emerged in Vienna. The fact that Sigmund Freud lived there is too easy. More fundamental was the half-hidden disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated on the battlefield by Prussia, torn apart by Balkan nationalism and devastated by the bank crash of 1873.

Its reigning Empress Elisabeth was half mad or, as Bettelheim more clinically describes her, "hysterical, narcissistic, and anorexic." And the heir apparent, Crown Prince Rudolf, climaxed a sexual episode by killing both his mistress and himself. Yet this was also the era of The Blue Danube. Bettelheim's conclusion: "Things had never been better, but at the same time they had never been worse; this strange simultaneity, in my opinion, explains why psychoanalysis, based on the understanding of ambivalence, hysteria, and % neurosis, originated in Vienna and probably could have originated nowhere else."

This engaging book is not really about Freud's Vienna, however, so much as Bettelheim's Vienna. The two men shared the same city for more than a third of a century. Freud had recently published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, when Bettelheim was born in 1903. He became interested in psychoanalysis because another schoolboy was impressing Bettelheim's girlfriend with prattle about the new theories of Dr. Freud. As a young man, Bettelheim liked to walk past Freud's establishment at Berggasse 19. "Looking up at his quarters, I always wondered why this great man chose to live there." (Bettelheim has a theory about that too.) Finally, Vienna expelled both of them, Freud to sanctuary in London in 1938, Bettelheim to a year in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.

In putting together a collection of essays, Bettelheim, 86, has created a kind of crypto-autobiography, because he keeps reverting to the elements that have established patterns in his life: psychoanalysis, art, children (he has specialized in treating autistic children at the University of Chicago) and the Holocaust. Several of those patterns combine in his moving account of Janusz Korczak, who headed the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, where a children's court enforced the children's rules. Despite friends' efforts to rescue him, Korczak insisted on staying with his children even as he walked hand in hand with them onto the train to Treblinka.

Ultimately, Bettelheim had to return to Dachau. His taxi drove past the barracks that he had once inhabited. "For a moment," he writes, "I was tempted to ask the driver to stop and let me out, but children were playing in front of it, and I thought better of disturbing their play and privacy for the sake of what by now was empty curiosity." This is a book that expresses kindness, strength and wisdom.