Bruno Bettelheim

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Bruno Bettelheim (born August 28, 1903 in Vienna , † March 13, 1990 in Silver Spring , Maryland , USA) was an American psychoanalyst and child psychologist of Austrian descent.

Life

Austria

Bruno Bettelheim grew up in a wealthy Viennese family, his father was a sawmill owner . Bettelheim was already interested in psychoanalysis when he was fourteen. Soon he was in a circle around Sigmund Freud and attended his lectures. At the University of Vienna , he first studied German and then art history . Eventually he finished studying philosophy . In 1938 he presented the dissertation The Problem of Natural Beauty and Modern Aesthetics , which dealt with Kant's philosophy.

In the same year, Bettelheim was interned as a Jew in the Dachau concentration camp and later transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp . In Buchenwald he became friends with Ernst Federn - son of the famous Viennese psychoanalyst Paul Federn . Together they developed the foundations of a psychology of terror as a survival strategy. After almost eleven months in a concentration camp, he was “allowed” to emigrate to the USA in 1939 thanks to the commitment of American supporters (including Eleanor Roosevelt ).

The 1941 was made withdrawing the doctorate by the National Socialists was explained by Senate resolution the University of Vienna on 10 April 2003 to be void.

Germany

The one year stay in the German concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald radically changed the life and later psychological work of Bettelheim. After he emigrated to America in 1939, he documented his experiences with other former concentration camp prisoners for three years. It was only after a distance of several years that he ventured into the elaboration and analysis, in which he consciously sought objectivity. Essentially, his findings can be summarized as follows:

Revision of Freud's psychoanalysis

As Bettelheim explains, Freud assumed that the “real human being” is predominantly formed from unconscious parts and that the influence of the environment is negligibly small. Through his experiences in the concentration camp, he had to realize that this idea was no longer tenable. Here in the concentration camp, the influence of the environment on the individual was so strong that the individual's character had changed completely within a very short time. He concluded from this that the methods of psychoanalysis were reduced to the special environment of a therapeutic practice, but that a general statement about the real person could not be made by it. He implemented his profound knowledge in America in a new therapeutic concept, which he called Milieu Therapy, which he implemented in the Orthogenic School in Chicago for the care of mentally disturbed children.

Integration within mass society

The remarks that he made on the subject of integrating the individual into mass society related in their most extreme form to the experiences in the concentration camp. However, Bettelheim emphasizes several times that the necessary knowledge about the inner nature of people can only be understood if National Socialism and the concentration camps are not understood as crimes that have been overcome, but as systemic components of a fascist system that follows an ideal. In many examples he shows that the individual in today's post-industrial society is still exposed to the same challenges as the Germans in the Third Reich. In this respect, he was not interested in settling accounts with the criminal methods of the SS and the Gestapo, but in revealing the natural connections between social coercion and the individual's striving for autonomy.

Autonomy and fear

Bettelheim explains that it is a sign of the mass state that it exerts pressure on its residents. People are z. B. forced to make serious adjustments in the area of ​​working hours. According to Bettelheim, in order to be able to maintain his personal maturity and full integration as a person, the individual should check to what extent and in what way he wants or can comply with the compulsory work. However, if the state exerts a great deal of coercion on this issue, the individual has no room for maneuver, because his or her existence is threatened if he cannot or does not want to meet the demands of the state.

The consequence is that the individual adapts or has to adapt largely without will in order to exist in the society in which he lives, which in extreme cases leads to a decline in self-respect and identification with his own life situation and crisis.

Overcoming fear is a central point in achieving autonomy. If one's own adaptation to the demands of the state releases insurmountable fears, then, if an attempt is nevertheless made to overcome these fears, an opposite process takes place: a stagnation occurs that prevents the individual from continuing to strive for autonomy because this would mean the disintegration or at least partial expulsion from social life - a double bind structure emerges , which ostensibly does not allow a solution as long as it remains accepted.

The result is that the individual can no longer find sufficient self-esteem and recognition from his own existence and his own actions and instead looks for and finds this in the idealized ideas that the state offers him in return. In this way, narcissistic self-worth can be temporarily stabilized in a kind of symbiosis . In the example of the Third Reich, the National Socialist system demanded unconditional adaptation of the individual in order to assign him a (seemingly) glorious place within an important “race” (Germany must live, even if I must die).

Autonomy and indolence

According to Bettelheim, the individual needs a permanent review of the reality of life in order to maintain his or her autonomy. If the state gradually deprives its citizens of creative freedom, then it will force them to resist. If this resistance is broken, too, the whole of society will gradually transform itself into a collective disintegration, in which one's own fear of change is exchanged in favor of mental indolence.

Bettelheim makes this observation clear using the example of the Jews in the Third Reich: At first, the National Socialist system only restricted the business activities of Jews and hoped to force them to emigrate. However, only a few did so. The majority of Jews conformed and believed that somehow life could go on for them. As a result, the rights and freedoms of the Jews were restricted more and more without much resistance. According to Bettelheim, this observed indolence of the Jews would have given the National Socialists the idea of ​​being able to destroy them en masse. Bettelheim asks how hundreds of Jews allowed themselves to be led into the gas chambers by a single SS man without resistance, where they could easily have overpowered him. He explains this behavior with the complete disintegration of the people who could no longer feel the slightest impulse to resist.

Coercion and needs

Bettelheim explains that in mass society, the individual must operate between the poles of coercion and needs. If the adjustments in the direction of coercion become too strong, the individual can no longer perceive his needs and therefore no longer integrate them. Lead the adjustment too strongly towards needs, then society will break down into individuals. In any case, however, the adaptation service is a measure specifically tailored to the situation, in which the individual must weigh up what will best meet his needs.

In order to establish this emotional balance, the individual must first of all be aware of his needs (not his wishes). This is where Bettelheim sees his central demand when he writes that we should no longer be satisfied with a life in which the needs of our feelings are alien to the understanding. In coming to terms with Nazi rule, he urges us not to explain the development as overcoming evil. Rather, the inhuman development of the Third Reich is the natural consequence of the systematic de-individualization of an entire society. Even if the Gestapo and concentration camps no longer exist, the field of tension between the mass state and the individual would remain unchanged.

Autistic disorder due to emotional cold

In another area, Bettelheim argued as follows after processing his concentration camp experiences: He compares the attitude towards life of autistic children with the emotional state of concentration camp inmates. Both suffered extreme mental deformations, as they received the message from their environment that it would be better if they were dead. He observed that prisoners who were able to maintain some contact with someone outside the camp had a much higher rate Had a chance of survival. Prisoners who had lost all contact with another person and only had to exist in the deadly reality of the camps usually died quickly.

He integrates this thesis into the treatment of emotionally disturbed children in the Orthogenic School and comes to findings that were very controversial at the time. In his opinion, a mother with cold emotions can disrupt the development of a self in the child so seriously that it cannot establish social contacts and suffers from the symptoms of the autistic group.

United States

He analyzed his experiences with extreme situations in the concentration camp in his 1943 essay Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations , which was published in German in his book Aufstand gegen die Masse .

In the USA, Bettelheim first became a research assistant at the University of Chicago . In 1944 he became head of the "Orthogenic School" there and assistant professor for child and adolescent psychology , psychiatry and pedagogy . The institution had been named by him in order to less stigmatize the children for their later careers . One of his main focuses there was the treatment of autistic children, whereby he developed his own, psychoanalytically shaped theory about the cause and genesis of autism. At the “Orthogenic School”, with the support of the Dean of the University of Chicago, Ralph W. Tyler, he worked on milieu therapy , which brought about significant further developments to the analytical psychotherapy practiced up until then.

From 1952 until his retirement in 1973 he was a full professor . In 1971 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In his book Children Need Fairy Tales ( The Uses of Enchantment ), published in 1976, he interpreted the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm psychoanalytically. In his view, they make the difference between the pleasure principle and the responsibility principle clear. Despite all the atrocities , he thought fairy tales were valuable because they always ended well. The sad Kunstmärchen of Hans Christian Andersen missing often this positive perspective.

Bettelheim's works are characterized by a plea for humanity and understanding. For decades he was considered the moral and professional authority on child-rearing in Europe and the USA .

Bettelheim was chosen to be the recipient of the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize of the University of Tübingen for 1990. The award was scheduled for May 15, 1990 in Tübingen. But already on March 13th (the anniversary of the " Anschluss ", more precisely of the reunification law of the German and Austrian governments on the day after the invasion) of the same year, six years after the death of his second wife Trude and after a stroke , Bettelheim took care of himself Suffocate life. He left a farewell letter to his three grown children; two daughters and one son.

criticism

The theory of the refrigerator mother

Bettelheim is often criticized for the fact that in his theory about the development of autism, errors in the upbringing of mothers during the first years of the child's life are given special importance (“ refrigerator mother ”).

Violence allegations

Shortly after Bettelheim's death, allegations were made about his behavior towards the children in trust , including an article entitled Benno Brutalheim in the American news magazine Newsweek . Bettelheim falsified the results of his scientific work and hit children in the Orthogenic School, including children with autism.

Some of the “ punishments ” were spontaneous, public and for reasons that were not visible to the children, according to former patients. For example, the psychoanalyst Bettelheim perceived unintentional physical contact between a child and other children while exercising together as a manifestation of unconscious aggression. In Chicago psychoanalyst circles, Bettelheim was spoken of as "Benno Brutalheim" years before his death.

Among the original critics was Richard Pollak, former editor of The Nation magazine , whose brother committed suicide in Bettelheim's care . Rejected by Bettelheim and confronted with the background to his brother's death, he questions Bettelheim's integrity in his biography. Since then, the allegations have been critically reflected on from various perspectives.

Criticism of the interpretation of the concentration camp inmates

A sharp criticism of Bettelheim's image of the Shoah and his ideas about the behavior and mental state of concentration camp inmates was formulated by Jacob Robinson in his book Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum in 1970 , and by the literary scholar Terrence Des Pres in 1976 and 1979 on a broad basis Survivor Reports argued. Above all, Des Pres criticized Bettelheim's thesis of an infantile regression of the inmates and his allegations that prisoners had identified with the SS.

Works

Essays

  • Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. In: Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Volume 38, 1943, pp. 417-452.
  • Joey: A "Mechanical Boy". In: Scientific American. Volume 200, March 1959, pp. 117-126.

Monographs

  • with Morris Janowitz : Dynamics of Prejudice. A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans . Harper & Brothers, New York 1950.
  • Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. 1950.
    • German: Love alone is not enough: raising emotionally disturbed children. ISBN 3-608-95776-6 .
  • Symbolic wounds. Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. 1954.
  • Truants From Life. The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. 1955
    • German: They can't live like this: the rehabilitation of emotionally disturbed children. ISBN 3-608-94270-X .
  • The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. 1960.
    • German: uprising against the masses. The chance of the individual in modern society. Kindler, 1980, ISBN 3-596-42217-5 .
  • Dialogues with Mothers. The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. 1962.
  • The Empty Fortress: Infantile autism and the birth of the self. The Free Press, New York, 1967.
    • German: The birth of the self. The Empty Fortress. Successful therapy for autistic children. ISBN 3-596-42247-7 .
  • The Children of the Dream , Macmillan, London / New York 1969.
    • German: The children of the future. Community education as a way of a new pedagogy. ISBN 3-423-00888-1 .
  • A home for the heart. Knopf, New York 1974.
  • The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Knopf, New York 1976.
  • Surviving and Other Essays. Knopf, New York 1979.
    • German: Education for survival. On the psychology of the extreme situation. 1982, ISBN 3-423-15056-4 .
  • On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning. (with Karen Zelan). Knopf, New York 1982.
  • Freud and Man's Soul. Knopf, New York 1982.
  • A Good Enough Parent: A book on Child-Rearing. Knopf, New York 1987.
  • Un autre regard sur la folie.
    • German: love as therapy: conversations about the child's soul life. 1989, ISBN 3-492-10257-3 .
  • Freud's Vienna and Other Essays. Knopf, New York 1990.
    • German: Topics in my life: essays on psychoanalysis, child rearing and Jewish fate. ISBN 3-423-35062-8 .

literature

Reference books:

Contributions to life and work:

  • Ronald Angres: Who, Really, what Bruno Bettelheim? In: Commentary. 90, 4, 1990, pp. 26-30.
  • Rudolf Ekstein : My friend Bruno (1903–1990). How I remember him. In: Roland Kaufhold (Ed.): Approaching Bruno Bettelheim. Grünewald, Mainz 1994, pp. 87-94.
  • Bruno Bettelheim, Rudolf Ekstein: Boundaries between cultures. The last conversation between Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein. In: Roland Kaufhold (Ed.): Approaching Bruno Bettelheim. Grünewald, Mainz 1994, pp. 49-60.
  • Ernst Federn : Bruno Bettelheim and survival in the concentration camp. In: Roland Kaufhold (Ed.): Ernst Federn. Attempts at the psychology of terror. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 1999, pp. 105-108.
  • David James Fisher: Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Human Soul. Essays on Bruno Bettelheim. With the collaboration of R. Kaufhold, M. Löffelholz. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2003.
  • Elio Frattaroli: Bruno Bettelheim's Unrecognized Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought. In: Psychoanalytic Review. Vol. 81, 1994, no. 3, pp. 377-409.
  • Katharina Hanstein-Moldenhauer (ed.): Pedagogy and psychoanalysis. Learn from Bettelheim. For the 100th birthday of Bruno Bettelheim. Amberg, Worpswede 2004, ISBN 3-00-014832-9 . (Contribution to the congress Münster / Westphalia, 2003)
  • Roland Kaufhold (ed.): Pioneers of psychoanalytic pedagogy: Bruno Bettelheim, Rudolf Ekstein , Ernst Federn and Siegfried Bernfeld . In: psychosocial. No. 53, 1/1993.
  • Roland Kaufhold: Bettelheim, Ekstein, Federn: Impulses for the psychoanalytic-pedagogical movement. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2001.
  • Roland Kaufhold, M. Löffelholz (Ed.): “They can't live like that.” Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990). In: Journal for Political Psychology. 1-3 / 2003.
  • Friedrich Koch : The dawn of pedagogy. Worlds in your head: Bettelheim, Freinet, Geheeb, Korczak, Montessori, Neill, Petersen, Zulliger. Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-434-53026-6 .
  • Bernd Otto: Bruno Bettelheim's milieu therapy. 1st edition. Deutscher Studien-Verlag, Weinheim 1986, ISBN 3-89271-004-X .
  • Franz-Josef Krumenacker: Bettelheim. UTB 1998, ISBN 3-8252-2050-8 .
  • Theron Raines: Rising to the Light. A portrait of Bruno Bettelheim. Knopf, New York 2002, ISBN 0-679-40196-2 .
  • Nina Sutton: Bruno Bettelheim. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-455-08604-7 .
  • Sabine Wesely: Bruno Bettelheim's milieu therapy. Intention, theory and practice. In: European University Writings. Row 6: Psychology. Volume 595, Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / New York / Paris / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-631-31859-6 .
  • Bruno Bettelheim: uprising against the masses. Kindler Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-463-02217-6 .

Critical contributions to the discussion:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Senate resolution of the University of Vienna of April 10, 2003 (PDF file; accessed on March 13, 2017; 119 kB)
  2. ↑ a b c d e Bruno Bettelheim: Revolt against the crowd. ISBN 3-463-02217-6 , chap. 1.
  3. ↑ Ralph W. Tayler: Bruno Bettelheim. In: Youtube ( online )
  4. ^ AP : Tübingen Lucas Prize for Bruno Bettelheim. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 11, 1989.
  5. ↑ Who cleans? In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1991 ( online ).
  6. ^ Judith Sinzig: History section . In: Autism spectrum disorders in children, adolescents and adults, interdisciplinary S3 guideline of the DGKJP and the DGPPN as well as the participating specialist societies, professional associations and patient organizations long version; Consensus conference on 24./25. April 2015 As of February 23, 2016. Accessed February 25, 2019.
  7. ↑ David James Fisher: The two faces of Bruno Bettelheim. Psychoanalytic cultural criticism and the human soul. Essays on Bruno Bettelheim. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2003.
  8. ↑ Peter Schneider on The Two Faces of Bruno Bettelheim . NZZ from November 16, 2003. Retrieved February 25, 2003.
  9. ↑ Elisabeth Wehrmann: Faust's blindness time online. Article dated September 21, 1990. Retrieved February 25, 2019.
  10. ^ Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Deutschlandfunk from March 13, 2015 . Retrieved February 25, 2019.
  11. ^ Jacob Robinson: Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum. Bruno Bettelheim and the Holocaust. New York 1970.
  12. ↑ Terrence Des Pres: The Survivor. An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York 1976 (German: The survivor. Anatomy of the death camps. Stuttgart 2008); Terrence Des Pres: The Bettelheim Problem. In: Social Research. Volume 46, H. 4, Winter 1979, pp. 619-647.
personal data
SURNAME Bettelheim, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychoanalyst and child psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1990
Place of death Silver Spring , Maryland, USA