Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
The Survivor
By Rosemary Dinnage
Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy
by Nina Sutton, translated by David Sharp
BasicBooks, 606 pp., $35.00
Not long after she started to research her biography of Bruno Bettelheim, writes Nina Sutton, she found herself wondering whose life it was that she was writing. When she started in July of 1990, she believed she was researching a brilliant writer and psychologist, a courageous Holocaust survivor, an almost saintly man of unblemished integrity. Fairly soon, like most biographers, she was discovering the flaws in the saint—the bad tempers, the small lies, the family difficulties. But by December of that year, if she told people what she was writing, she would be asked, 'Will it be for or against?'; or simply, 'Why?' For it was in March that Bettelheim, old, isolated, and very sick, had taken his life. In the months following, the Bettelheim 'scandal' (as it was known in the States, although not in France or Britain) had erupted—something almost unprecedented, as she says, in the worlds of academe and psychoanalysis. Every aspect of his reputation came under sudden attack and was, so it seemed, demolished.
Review, 5452 words
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