To the editors: “Never kick a man when he’s down,” and certainly Bruno Bettelheim is now down. This saying should really not apply to Bettelheim because he got a free ride from the psychoanalytic mafia in this country for over forty years, and now the worm is turning. Those of us who really knew him best, former Orthogenic School students and counselors, finally have an audience that has been created as a result of his bizarre death, and we deserve to get a few kicks in after all these years [Letters, April 6 and 20; May 4, 11, and 25; and June 8 and 15].
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I was one of the early counselors at the school, in the late 1940’s, following WW II. A number of us were veterans, who had probably seen more of life by age 21 than Bettelheim had seen at age 40. That fact never seemed to penetrate Bettelheim’s low threshold of awareness of the true nature of the world around him. He tried to bully the counselors as much as he did the defenseless children in the school. He was just a bit more circumspect with us veterans. We stuck with the job though because it was a good one for a U.C. graduate student at the time. The pay was low but fair. Free meals came with the job. We enjoyed working with the children. An on-campus location made it convenient, and yes, one gained instant social and academic stature because at that time, America and the U.of C.’s love affair with psychoanalysis was at its height.
The majority of the counselors at the Orthogenic School through were women. Bettelheim seemed to feel more comfortable with the female counselors and used them, rather than men, as his deputies. The female counselors were truly Bettelheim’s Roman cohorts. The understanding that most of the men had was that Bettelheim tried to seduce everyone into relating to him as their “therapist,” and this was a condition of job tenure. Our general feeling was that most of the women accepted this relationship, but we never knew for sure. Their job tenure certainly was longer than most of the men’s.
Bettelheim was a professional success. Why? Simple. He defined a child’s problem without any meaningful critical peer review, and then proceeded to solve the problem, again without critical review. A generally compliant and emotionally dependent staff then put their imprimatur on his self-declared and widely proclaimed success. Oh, that’s life’s tasks should be so easy for all of us. Invent a problem, then declare the invented problem solved. If the biological sciences used that same methodology, Stalin’s favorite biologist, Lysenko (He was a Russian biologist who was given dictatorial control by Stalin over Soviet agricultural policy. Lysenko’s theories coincided with Stalin’s view of how man, and therefore plants, could be “remade” by experience. Those who disagreed with Lysenko were often physically and, most certainly, intellectually liquidated) would have received a Nobel prize, but the Russians would still, as today, be buying American wheat to feed their people. Bettelheim, like Lysenko, was smiled upon by the leadership, but his theories may have as little substance.
