Bruno Bettelheim

A well-written, fascinating portrait of Bruno Bettelheim that seeks to uncover the entire man with all his flaws and all his virtues.

Who was Bruno Bettelheim? The brilliant discoverer of a unique method of treating psychotic children, justly acclaimed the world over? Or the brutal and despotic bully who was denounced after his death by former students and patients? In her quest to understand this puzzling and powerful man, Nina Sutton spent five years tracing Bettelheim's footsteps from Vienna to Los Angeles, via Chicago, Basel, and Jerusalem. She interviewed students and colleagues, friends and enemies, and uncovered rare documents, including Bettelheim's letters from Buchenwald and Dachau.

Most significantly, he was a therapist driven by an almost magical idea: that from an absolute evil, Nazism, could be drawn the salvation of deeply disturbed children. Sutton shows how Bettelheim discovered his life force in the concentration camp and then tried to use his own aggression as a lightning rod for the self-destructive anger and violence seething within the children in his care. Probing deep into his past and into the scandal that broke out after his suicide, she reveals how care and brutality, commitment to truth and a passion for fairy tales, could coexist in this exceptional man.

Is suicide ever rationally or morally justified? A host of suicide related matters are explored in this timely collection of essays that clarifies the battlelines of public debate surrounding this intense and painful topic. This classic volume has been updated and expanded with ten new selections, making it one of the most complete works available on the subject.

The eighteen which form this collection by Federn, some previously unpublished, are grouped under 4 headings: On Social Psychology, On the Psychology of terror and Violence, On Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and On the History of Psychoanalysis.

A few years after Austria's disastrous defeat in the First World War, Vienna, a city hardly known for intellectual fervor or serious discourse, suddenly emerged as a mecca for psychology. This is the first book to present that history within the context of the political and social events of the time. Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karl Buhler, Erik Erikson, and Helene Deutsch were among the hundreds of famous psychologists who lived and established training centers in Vienna. Momentous historical events forced the emigration of the majority of Vienna's leading psychologists, who, largely Socialist and Jewish, emigrated when Austria was "annexed" by Germany, abruptly ending the Golden Age.