Nina Sutton

Bruno Bettelheim was a legendary psychotherapist; a revered author of influential clinical studies on the lives of autistic children as well as popular Freudian interpretations of myth and fairy tale; and founder of the Orthogenic School of psychoanalysis in Chicago. Nina Sutton, an admirer of his work, found herself stunned by the "Bettelheim Affair"--the scandal that erupted after he killed himself in 1990, at the age of 86, when his reputation as a benevolent sage was besmirched by former patients who claimed that he had sadistically beaten them. Beginning her biography with an account of that scandal, Sutton proceeds to analyze the legacy of the man's work, relating it to his difficult life, and goes some way toward reclaiming Bettelheim's damaged reputation.

"When something bad happens to you," psychological innovator Bruno Bettelheim said, "turn it around and use it." He did. When the Nazis absorbed his Austrian homeland in 1938, Bettelheim was arrested for being a Jew and endured Buchenwald concentration camp for nearly a year. He arrived in the U.S. nearly penniless, armed with a doctorate in aesthetics. Never confessing he had no degree in psychology, he exploited his experience of psychoanalysis into an acclaimed and innovative career.… (meer)