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."