BOOKS
The Inimitable Bruno Bettelheim
THE CREATION OF DR. BETTELHEIM: A BIOGRAPHY OF
BRUNO BETTELHEIM. By Richard Pollak.
Simon & Schuster. $30.00
Did Bruno Bettelheim "create an ex-post-facto intellectual scaffolding
to rationalize a life of dissembling;' as his biographer Richard Pollak won–
ders, and
if
so, why did he not, as he himself had written, "admit [his] failures
and state the truth to redeem [himself)"? The short answer, I believe, is that
he
was
an inordinately successful dissembler, that his white lies made
him
famous, and that once embarked on his career it would have been foolish to
back down. And Bettelheim was anything but a fool. He invented past expe–
riences to land the jobs he desired after arriving in the U.S., and then
improvised to go on to bigger and better things. He pontificated about his
experiences in the concentration camps and soon was quoted as an expert on
"surviving." Although he was not the only former Viennese to have done so,
he probably was the only one who turned his biography-cum-fiction into
distinguished professorships, honorary degrees, and worldwide acclaim.
In 1967, Richard Pollak went to meet Bruno Bettelheim, then the cel–
ebrated director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University
of Chicago, to find out more about his brother, Stephen's, death while he had
been a resident about two decades before. He was puzzled by Bettelheim's
defensive stance--the depiction
of
his mother as a villain, of his father as inef–
fectual, and his certainty that his brother's thirty-foot drop into the shute of
a haystack had been a suicide. "What
is
it
about these Jewish mothers,
Mr.
Pollak?" Bettelheim asked, stunning his interlocutor by the ferocity of his
antagonism so many years later. This interview eventually induced Pollak to
write his excellent, and even-handed, biography of the
willful
yet charrning
man whose lies in truth and truth in lies were germane to his whole being.
Self-hatingJews grew like mushrooms in Bettelheim's Vienna, and many
among them inflated their previous accomplishments and schooling after
arriving in America because they needed to work. In fact, the refugees who
congregated at the Eclair on New York's 72nd Street in the early 1940s used
to joke about the fiddlers who now claimed to have played with the Vienna
Philharmonic, or even to have conducted at the
Staatsoper;
about the shop
owners who now reminisced about their department stores; and about the
bank employees who puffed themselves up into bankers. Nevertheless, the
newcomers' recent escape, their fear for their relatives' lives, their drop from
bourgeois comfort into poverty, and the scramble for unskilled jobs while
