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PARTISAN REVIEW
by a web of half-truths? Of course, he benefitted from Americans'increasing
search for methods to treat emotionally disturbed and delinquent children.
Although other experts were advocating treatment rather than custodial care,
they were not able to hug the public stage in the way he did. Of course, he
was a more inventive writer than most of the others investigating the causes
and treatment of autism, and in addition was able to hold on to exceedingly
devoted editors who diligently worked on his prose. And after he became the
darling of
The New Yorker
there was no keeping him from making a splash
with his free associations.
Bettelheim turned himself into an expert on child rearing in the Kibbutz
after reviewing Melford Spiro's book on the subject. He criticized this
anthropologist's thesis, which was based on a year-long study, as weak and
limited, in order to advance his own agenda. Without ever having visited
Israel, or a Kibbutz, Bettelheim argued that its children ended up viewing
their parents casually and amiably, but with neither love nor respect, and that
their parents, in turn, did not miss having their children's emotions centered
around them. From this invention he went on to hold that kibbutz education
was an "unequivocal success"-at a time when kibbutniks were already
ambivalent about it and began keeping their children at home.
It
does not
take much to see that this thesis helped bolster Bettelhein1's view that par–
ents were a bad influence on their offipring, and his resolve to keep them
away from his own charges at the Orthogenic School.
In
1977,
Bettelheim published
The Uses
if
Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance
if
Fairy Tales.
He claimed that only some psychoanalysts had (too
simplistically and dogmatically) addressed the importance of these tales to
young children, and that no one had written about the subject. Pollak points
out, and documents in detail, that this wasn't true; like the hungry Hansel,
Bettelheim helped himself to Julius Heuscher's interpretations-and then
failed even to list the book in his bibliography. He concluded that we could
learn more about human and societal predicaments from fairy tales than from
most other literature, and that children could well handle encounters with
wolves and witches, even at bedtime. This book received a National Book
Critics' Circle prize and a National Book Award. By then he had retired, and
had moved to a dream house in California. But he was not content, and still
held on to his sense of inferiority.
Bettelheim made his last big splash in
1982,
with a little book he called
Freud and Man's Soul.
It started out as a long piece for
The New Yorker,
point–
ing out that Freud's texts had been badly translated, had been tailored for
American Freudians who had scientized psychoanalysis in order to make it
acceptable to the medical profession, and that Strachey's translations had
drained Freud's texts of their humanist qualities. Bettelheim offered excellent
exan1ples, such as rendering
Fehlleistung
as parapraxis,
Schaulust
(the pleasure of
