When Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide last year at age 86, obituaries hailed him as a world-renowned pioneer psychoanalyst whose soulful caring for disturbed children inspired a lifelong effort to heal their early wounds.
As August Chicago underscores, Bettelheim was a far more ambiguous figure than was intimated by the farewells, such as a typically reverential Page 1 effort in The New York Times.
Penelope Mesic`s ”The Abuses of Enchantment” (the title is inspired by Bettelheim`s 1976 best-seller on the positive uses of fairy tales, ”The Uses of Enchantment”) builds on serious doubts about his methods and personality that were raised by post-death letters to newspapers from former patients and in critical reappraisals, including pieces in Commentary and the Chicago Tribune.
She details how he fudged some of his personal background, including a claim of having been placed in a concentration camp by the Nazis for left-wing political involvement, not for being Jewish (his first wife says that`s malarkey, that he wasn`t politically involved at all). Mesic also underscores how his track record with patients is debatable; how some of his theories, including those on the origin of autism, were dead wrong; and strengthens the suspicion that his writings cultivated a too-readily-accepted image of kindly infallibility.
One former patient at the Orthogenic Center at the University of Chicago, the path-breaking treatment center for disturbed children that Bettelheim founded, calls him a ”Dr. Mengele of the mind.” A psychiatrist derides him as a ”nasty man” who traumatized children by instilling the sense that
”families are basically evil.”
And the school`s current director, Jacquelyn Sanders, pointedly doesn`t defend much of his conduct and tells Mesic, ”I`ve stayed at this work while feeling very negative about Bruno myself.”
Yet she has stayed at the place he founded and clearly loved. Which helps remind us of our frequent acceptance of stick-figure assessments of our heroes and villains, obscuring the double edges.
The same ex-patient who calls him a Dr. Mengele admits to having returned to the school regularly in search of Bettelheim`s wisdom.
”Bettelheim wasn`t a saint or a monster,” says sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. ”People idealized him and expected the impossible.”
July 29 U.S. News & World Report could bring a boom in Perrier and Evian sales as it outlines perils in our tap water. … In July 29 Newsweek, contributing editor Gregg Easterbrook notes a spate of journalists being caught plagiarizing (”the world`s dumbest crime”) and tells what it was like to learn that his words were ripped off in a Stanford University business lecturer`s book. … Boy, here`s a sociological exclusive from a reporter who must have just dropped in from Mars: July 29 Time informs that many blacks and Hispanics aren`t chums (”bitter divisions are breaking out”).
A July 29 Business Week story on the debt woes of British media mogul Robert Maxwell notes that he values his 50 percent of a joint venture with McGraw-Hill Inc., publisher of Business Week, at $670 million, but a
”publishing industry executive familiar with the venture” thinks it`s $500 million. A McGraw-Hill executive?
In a sort of Pizzazz Poll of pundits and marketers, the July 22 issue of revitalized Sporting News rates pro volleyball player Randy Stoklos just ahead of Magic Johnson as the most charismatic sports star. Just kidding. It`s Michael Jordan. The lone woman on the list of 17 vote-getters was golfer Nancy Lopez.
The August issue of relaunched and meaty Ms is again filled with surprises, including an overview of, and questionnaire on, racial politics as they affect women; inspection of the chagrin of Nicaraguan feminists with the government of Violeta Chamorro (”more housewife and grandmother than politician”); analysis of the vastly-improved status of women in comics; and a look at an unlikley but disenfranchised political leader, Burma`s Aung San Suu Kyi, who returned home from England in 1988 to visit her sick mother, stumbled into being an opposition leader and has been detained for three years.
Now, July Discover has one for Ms to mull: a provocative theory from evolutionary biologists that many so-called male characteristics, such as the tendency to struggle aggressively for territory and status, evolved from
”sperm wars” and reflect traits developed by individual sperm trying to survive.
