BOOK REVIEW : Essaying a Tantalizing, Unusual Autobiography

Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays, by Bruno Bettelheim (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95, 271 pp.)

At 85, Bruno Bettelheim remains one of the commanding figures of psychoanalysis and child psychology in the 20th Century--a man who survived the Holocaust and then devoted his life and work to exploring the most intimate regions of the human mind and the human experience. Yet Bettelheim declines to reveal very much of himself in print: “I believe what Freud said about biographies applies even more to autobiographies, namely that the person who undertakes such a task ‘binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery.’ ” Curiously, the analyst who has probed deeply into the heart and mind mostly refuses to divulge the secrets of “that most private world which I believe best remains private.”

Instead, by way of summing up a life of immense intellectual accomplishment, Bettelheim now offers a collection of 18 of his most important essays, none of which are otherwise available in book form. Bettelheim gives us a few tantalizing details of his own experiences in Vienna, in Dachau and elsewhere, but these lectures, book reviews and essays are mostly works of critical scholarship, not self-revelation. As I read Bettelheim’s lapidary words, I had the sensation of strolling through an elegant sculpture garden, stopping here and there to contemplate the statuary. Many of these essays are famous and familiar, a few are even notorious, others are fairly obscure, but all reveal the workings of a civilized and compassionate mind.

The first section of the book is devoted to Freud and psychoanalysis, and the title essay is a fine example of Bettelheim’s genius for picking out what seems to be a narrow and even parochial topic--the reason why psychoanalysis “was born and came of age” in Vienna--and then bringing his mastery of art, history, letters and science to bear upon his subject. Thus, for example, we are reminded in “Freud’s Vienna” of the political and diplomatic decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire; the sexual scandals of the Hapsburg court, including the suicide pact of the crown prince and his lover; the obsession with sex and death in the art and letters of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and, above all, how all of it influenced Freud as the founder of psychoanalysis.

Even more compelling is “A Secret Asymmetry,” in which Bettelheim demonstrates his genius for turning a book review into a fascinating short course in the history and politics of psychoanalysis. Here, Bettelheim uses the publication of the letters of Dr. Sabina Spielrein, an early patient of Jung and later a practitioner of psychoanalysis, to reveal some of the shocking details of the love affair between Jung and Spielrein, to explore the rivalries between Freud and Jung, and to pay homage to “one of the great women pioneers of psychoanalysis.”

The second section of “Freud’s Vienna” is ostensibly devoted to the fundamental theme of Bettelheim’s research, writing and practice: “On Children and Myself.” Bettelheim includes his thoughts on “The Child’s Perception of the City,” “Children and Museums” and “Children and Television,” as well as an essay on the similarities between the techniques used by Annie Sullivan in teaching Helen Keller and Bettelheim’s own “milieu” therapy for severely disturbed children.

But the miscellaneous essays also collected here range from a discussion of the “essential books” of Bettelheim’s life (Freud, of course, as well as the works of Jacob Burckhardt, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Goethe) to a call-to-arms addressed to the makers of motion pictures: “Let us hope that the art of the moving image, this most authentic American art, will soon meet the challenge of becoming truly the great art of our age” by “giving us myths suitable to live by in our time, visions that transmit to us the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.”

The final section of “Freud’s Vienna” is the most honest and touching--and, for me, the most troubling and painful. In these final essays, Bettelheim offers a moral and historical perspective of the Holocaust that may be charitably described as deeply challenging.

Bettelheim praises the righteous few who acted courageously in the face of death, including Janusz Korczak, the director of a Warsaw orphanage who turned down the opportunity to save himself and instead accompanied the young children in his care to the gas chambers at Treblinka, and Miep Giese, the Dutchman who helped to shelter the family of Anne Frank. And he contemplates the special horrors of the “Children of the Holocaust.”

“The terrible silence of children who are forced to endure the unendurable!” Bettelheim writes in an uncharacteristic cry of despair. “Their agony is mute: with all the strength available to them they need to bury in the depths of their souls a wound, an anguish which never leaves them, a sorrow so cruel that it defies all expression.”

Bettelheim’s compassion, remarkably enough, extends not only to the German people, but even the tormentors of little children: “The conclusion became inescapable that every German had in some way or other been an inmate of that wider concentration camp which was the Third Reich,” Bettelheim writes of his return to Dachau after the war. “Every German who had lived under the Nazi regime, whether he accepted it or fought it, had been through a concentration camp in a sense. Some, the actual camp inmates, had gone through it as tortured slaves; others, the majority of Germans, had gone through it as trustees, so to speak.”

Some minds and hearts may recoil at such expressions of compassion, especially when we consider that Bettelheim has some sharp and even shocking words for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whom he also sees as victims of “ghetto thinking.” But the fact is that Bettelheim, although guarded about the most intimate details of his own life, is honest and plain-spoken when it comes to revealing what he has learned and what he believes. For that reason, “Freud’s Vienna” is an accurate, useful and even inspiring gloss on the life’s work of a man of conscience.