Volume 8, Number 8 · May 4, 1967
Lost Children
By Charles Rycroft
The Empty Fortress
by Bruno Bettelheim
Free Press, 484 pp., $9.95
Professor Bettelheim is an authority on the capacity to survive extreme situations. His earlier book, The Informed Heart, which was mainly based on his personal experiences and observations while a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, was largely an analysis of what decided whether a person lived or died in a concentration camp. In it he was concerned not so much with the physical capacity to survive brutality and torture as with the psychological factors determining whether a person will be able to resist demoralization in a setting in which he has ceased to be in any way a free agent—a setting, moreover, which is designed to reduce him to a nonentity and, indeed, has no wish that he should go on living.
Review, 2078 words
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