HERO OR HUMBUG?

By John Elson

Seldom has anyone fallen from hero to humbug faster than Dr. Bruno Bettelheim. After he killed himself in 1990 at age 86, obituaries hailed Bettelheim as a giant of psychotherapy, a survivor of two Nazi prison camps (Dachau and Buchenwald) who pioneered in the treatment of emotionally troubled children. In 18 books (including Love Is Not Enough and The Uses of Enchantment) and dozens of articles and TV appearances, he was an all-knowing guru to millions on topics ranging from the meaning of fairy tales to parent-child relations.

Within months, however, Bettelheim's reputation was in tatters. Former students at the University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, which he directed for more than 25 years, broke silence to charge that one component of "Dr. B's" treatment was physical abuse. Investigating scholars belatedly discovered that Bettelheim had lifted, without credit, many of his provocative insights from other writers and had flagrantly lied about his background. For example, he liked to boast that his entry into analytic training had been approved by Sigmund Freud himself. But there is no evidence that he ever met Freud or trained to be an analyst. (Bettelheim's doctorate was in philosophy, not medicine or psychology.)

The posthumous assault continues in Richard Pollak's The Creation of Dr. B. (Simon & Schuster; 478 pages; $28), a glum prosecutor's brief that is the second life of Bettelheim to be published within a year. A prolix psychobiography by Anglo-French journalist Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and A Legacy (Basic-Books; 606 pages; $35), covered the same ground but more sympathetically.

Unlike Sutton, Pollak, a former editor for the Nation, met Dr. B. The writer's younger brother Stephen spent five years at the Orthogenic School before his accidental death in 1948. Meeting some 20 years later, Bettelheim loftily informed Pollak that his father had been an ineffective "schlemiel," that his Medea-like mother was wholly to blame for Stephen's emotional ills and, quite falsely, that the brother had committed suicide. No wonder Pollak left that encounter mentally comparing Bettelheim to "the evil Doctor Sivana, arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel."

As The Creation of Dr. B. makes clear, Pollak's opinion of Bettelheim has not much improved. Still, the author does provide plausible rationales for his subject's often bizarre behavior. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Bettelheim was a frail, nearsighted child who was acutely conscious of his physical ugliness. As an adult, he was plagued by fits of depression and haunted by the memory that his father had died of syphilis.

Why did Bettelheim lie so much about his past? He often said the theories he applied at the Orthogenic School stemmed from his pioneering work in Vienna with an autistic child he called Patsy. In fact, the girl had been treated by his first wife, Gina Alstadt, at a time when Bettelheim was running his family's lumber business. Similarly, Bettelheim boasted of having been a member of Austria's anti-Nazi resistance. Pollak quotes Alstadt as saying, "Bruno was not interested in politics."

As Pollak sees it, these compulsive fabrications stem from Bettelheim's fascination with the "As If" philosophy of a post-Kantian thinker named Hans Vaihinger. He believed that people could act meaningfully even on the basis of fictions they knew to be false because such fantasies helped them see the world more objectively and make life bearable.

The book doesn't assess the lasting impact of Dr. B.'s psychological theories. That may be because in his case the cupboard is depressingly bare. As Pollak points out, Bettelheim's books tend to be anecdotal rather than systematic and on many issues his opinions are either outdated or just plain wrong. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that autism is organic in origin, for example, Bettelheim was reluctant to modify his opinion that the disorder is caused by bad parenting. His harsh criticism of European Jews in The Informed Heart--that "ghetto thinking" led them to submit passively to Hitler's Holocaust--is not only distasteful but also contrary to the facts.

There is no doubt that Bettelheim and his school helped troubled youths, although not so many as he liked to claim. Countless readers, moreover, found provocation if not inspiration in his books, which for the most part are blessedly free of analytic jargon. But Pollak's biography makes a persuasive case that Dr. B. was a manipulative, domineering ego tripper who abused his charges and co-workers psychically if not physically. For all his public charisma and healing skills, he might have been an evil twin to the Wizard of Oz.