Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp

Bruno Bettelheim has now made it to the United States, where he executes his elaborate plan to fix "emotionally disturbed" children by making a nice concentration camp.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Also media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about bad people and problematic people, and we've got both
this week with the story of Bruno Bettelheim, a man who.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Is really really testing my previous conclusion that like there's
no there's no what wrong way to react to having
been in a concentration camp. Maybe this way Bruno might
have might have been the guy to figure out the
wrong way.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Had to lose all sympathy.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, my guest with me again as in part one,
Alison Rask and Alison, how are you doing? It's the
same day, but we pretend it's a separate one.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
I'm good. What I didn't reveal it episode one, which
I feel like will be more relevant for this part
of what of his life story is that I actually
have had and OCD since I was four years old.
So I was someone who was treated for pretty severe
mental illness as a young child and was put on

(01:10):
prozac when I was four, and was actually incredibly thankful
for my parents being proactive in that way and getting
me the help that I needed. So I'm like, not
so that it is at all against taking children's mental
health seriously, and it's like kind of a lot of
the activism I do, but I think we're about to
explore a scenario where that goes.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Wrong, horribly horribly wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:36):
Well, it's also you.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Know, it's interesting because a big part of Bruno's story
and a big part of like where people go wrong
because like, as you said, it's good to be involved
and care about your children's mental health and the mental
health of children in general. Bruno as a young man
takes this kid in who is like neurodivergent and her
mom just like I don't want to raise a kid, right,

(01:59):
find someone else to do it for me. And Bruno's
whole business as an adult is not just I'm helping
kids who are having problems. It's I am taking these
kids away from their rich parents who do not want
to deal with them and handling them, you know, which
is very different from the healthy version of this where
you're just because I have a lot of empathy even
in this time right where we talk about like he's

(02:19):
diagnosing kids as things that we would not today because
they just don't. I'm not judgmental of someone who legitimately
is trying to help kids, and its just like we
called things by different names then we didn't know as
much as we know now. It's one thing to make errors,
it's another thing to have your whole goal be what
if a concentration camp but nice for children, which is

(02:40):
again part of the motivating factor here.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
And also like we're still getting stuff wrong now. Oh yeah,
absolutely then it was, but it's still a flawed system.
And yes, there's also a lot of debate about the
merits of diagnosing at all. Yeah, someone that has found
comfort and and sort of clarity in being diagnosed and

(03:06):
have had my diagnosis my pretty much my whole life.
But a lot of people don't feel that way, and
so it's it's an interesting debate.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
And that they feel totally totally different about it than
in the forties. Like one thing they do constantly is
diagnosed kids as psychotic, right, which you cannot today. That
is not something that happens because like like like you,
the idea that like you would diagnose a child as
being a psychopath, right, is very normal then, right, And.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Well now they'll do oppositional defiance a sort right, right,
which is which is like a pathway or whatever towards
that eventual diagnosis. But there are certain restraints around what
age you can call people certain what age, you can
give them certain things.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
And and that just like it's the wild West in
Bruno's era. Now Bruno has at the time, we've you know,
we're starting up here. He has just gotten over to
the US. He has escaped the Holocaust, and he has
gotten a job. He's started out as an academic. He had,

(04:12):
you know, lost his family business. At this point, he
has no money. But this lady who you know, he
had helped raise her daughter, is kind of taking care
of them, right, And the understanding is that they need
to figure out something, but like they're not immediate, they're
not like on the streets or whatever. Right, and Bruno
very quickly is able to get work for himself, although
there's also some problematic aspects because his initial gig he

(04:37):
gets hired to be an English teacher in Portland, Oregon,
and then World War Two starts and suddenly the idea
of having an Austrian man teaching English is like, we're
not really bullish on the Austrians right now, even though
you were a victim of the Nazis, we don't actually
have a teaching position for you.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
It just feed yeah, yeah, the persecution and everything that's
happened to him until then.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, although it's also there's a degree to which this
works out well for Bruno because he doesn't really want
to be an English teacher and he doesn't want to
be an organ he is. He falls in love with
the idea of the city of Chicago, in part because
it has a more European layout, so he finds it
kind of more similar to where he'd come up. He
is very interested in child development and educational reform. These

(05:26):
are like academic interests. He's not a professional in these yet,
but this is what he wants for himself. So he
kind of works as an academic for a few years
until in nineteen forty four he receives his US citizenship.
That same year, he gets the job that will be
responsible for most of his fame and for most of
the problematic things he's going to do in his life,
which is directing the Orthogenic School. Now, I know what

(05:51):
you got you're saying, Robert, Orthogenic School sounds a dystopian
as fuck. That is a scary name for a school.
It is a scary name. The word orthogenic comes from
Greek and it literally means straightening out. So the school
for straightening out kids. That's a scary thing to call
us school. It had been established in nineteen fifteen, and

(06:11):
it was a residential facility where kids were interned until
their behavior was deemed to be fixed. Right, Like, that's
the like where it is. So this is a When
you talk about a residential facility, some of them have
elements and this is certainly the case at the time
of like a prison. Right now, this is not one
of those. This is for kids with resources.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
These are for kids with whose parents have money. So
this is not like the the This is not like
the worst versions of these facilities, right And in fact,
from the beginning, this is kind of viewed as a
response to those facilities which are a lot uglier. It
was a unique place geared not just for emotionally disturbed kids,
but for and these are the terms they use at

(06:55):
the time, but specifically for emotionally disturbed children of quote
above average intelligence. Right now, this means rich white kids,
right ah, yes, yes, that's when we say above average intellect.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
These are kids whose parents have money, and thus we're
our goal is to make sure they have a future.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
Right It would be fun to go through history and
find all the different euphemisms for rich white kids.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
And it's in when the school is found in nineteen fifteen,
they do they use these. They don't say this is
a school for rich white kids. They say like, this
is emostly disturbed but above average intelligence kids. Right as
soon as Bruno takes over, he's like, no, no Ah,
let's just say it's a school for rich white kids.
That's what we're doing, right, that's what we want to
do here, you know. And as soon as he takes over,
his first job as director is to turn this into policy.

(07:46):
Prior to him taking the director job, the school had
not had a white's only policy on paper. Bruno Institute's one.
He's like, look, let's call a we're racist as fuck.
We're racist as fuck. It's just say it's white and
again school in nineteen fifteen, is it willing to say that?
In forty four Brutos like, oh, obviously, we're whites only.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Like you go right from a concentration camp to like
a white's only instituting a white's only policy. I mean
it feels so like directly a I need to align myself.
Oh yeah, the people in power, yes, Like I can
no longer be viewed as other. And so it's like

(08:26):
this right, because I mean some people at that time
probably didn't definitely didn't view Jews as white. Like then
it would be like you're not allowed to be at.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
This school, especially not at this time.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
No, it's his way of like making sure that he's
in with the with the people in power.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
And he is.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
He has.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
He does a lot of writing about his attitudes that, like,
he doesn't like Christianity either because he's not a religious guy,
but he thinks it's better than Judaism. And so the
school will be specifically a Christian school, even when it
sort of is educating kids who don't come from Christian families,
he tries to acculturate them. The only holiday they celebrate

(09:03):
at the school is Christmas, So his attitude is very
much even when the students are, you know, not from
a Christian background, I want to acculturate them as white Christians, right, and.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
That is be a Jewish man would love to do that.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, I know exactly how to celebrate Christmas now. Bruno
justifies his white's only policy by arguing that racialized children
that means non white kids, would confuse the white kids
and harm their recovery. The term racialized to describe kids
that just start white. No, these kids, they can't handle

(09:40):
the shock of seeing somewhere explicit white. That'll fuck up
their recovery.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
That person doesn't look exactly like me. I have to
commit a cross.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
I can't handle it. I can't handle it. I'm gonna
go rob a bank now. Bruno also wrote that he
was only interested in white students from quote good high
class stock. That meant kids who's families could afford to
send them to college. He instituted a tuition of eight
to twelve thousand dollars a year to ensure that no
poor children were educated at the Orthogenic school. If you're

(10:10):
carrying the forties, that's in the forties. Wow, that is
this is like really really like high grade university education.
Is what this costs per year. And the expectation is
that you will put them in there at least for
two years, and many of them for like something like
ten to twelve. Right, he really wants you to give

(10:31):
your kid to him for that kid's entire childhood. Otherwise
he can't fix them, right, that's his motivation.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
But then if you do, they come out great.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
But then they come out.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
But if they see a person with different colored skin,
they will start screaming.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
No, you got to give you gotta let me have
them until they're like twenty, you know, make sure you
don't see anybody else.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
They can't see anyone else or they will lose it.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, there's like forty to sixty kids at this institution
at a given time. Now, the Bruto also has another
issue with the school as soon as he takes over.
You know, first job, make it expensive as shit, only
white kids. Second job, he has a real issue with
the fact that the orthogenic school there, you know the
motto is a place to go grow straight and tall,

(11:12):
allows disabled kids to be educated there. And he doesn't
like that because somebody with a physical disability can never
go grow straight and tall. And Bruno's eyes right. So again,
what the first things the Nazis do is go after
people with specifically children with disabilities. This is how they
test the the like the the the gas chambers right like,

(11:34):
which are initially like mobile execution vans for disabled people.
What is one of the first things Bruno does when
he starts this school, No more, get those disabled kids
out of here, none of them.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
I mean, he's really telling on himself, right that he
wrote that paper that people's reaction to being in a
concentration camp is to become a Nazi. Kind of your reaction, brun,
Just like, no, I've just become a Nazi. Therefore everyone
else must have as well, okay.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
In an article for Disability Studies Quarterly, Gryffin Epstein writes
whereas prior to his tenure, the school offered a residential
program for children with epilepsy and cerebral palsy, Betteleim was
certain that public institutions could handle such cases. This was
a bold claim, given that public schools weren't mainstreamed in
the United States until the Education for All Handicapped Children
Act of nineteen seventy five in the forties. Thus, those

(12:25):
public institutions handling children with epilepsy and CP were abusive
state institutions, group homes, and hospitals. So he just kind
of lies and says, ah, the schools can handle, and
then the schools are like, oh, no, we just locked
those kids up. We don't know what to do with them.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
You know, in his opinion, that's handling them right.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
That's handling them right. It can't be fixed. You know
in his attitude, right. Bruno's second act as director of
the Orthogenic School was to recruit a new population of students,
and he focuses mostly on children with autism and others
who he calls quote young victims of extreme psychosis. And
the reason he picks these kids and again, we would
not diagnose them the same way today, but these are

(13:04):
all kids that he sees as not having visible physical disabilities. Right,
That is the key point, right, That's what he means
by autism, right, is something is not neurotypical about this kid,
But they are not, in my eyes, physically disabled. That
is what he means by this, right.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Not like developmentally delayed in a physical way.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yes, yes, yes, and that's certainly how he sees it.
To continue with that article and constructing a dialectical opposition
between epilepsy, cerebral palsy and palsy and autism, Bettelheim helped
to tack to tacitly promote an eugenic logic of unreformable
versus reformable bodies. You know, and yes that is some
very very Nazi adjacent shit.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
The whole time he was in that camp, he was like,
these are good ideas.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
These are good.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
If it wasn't the Nazis doing them, I wouldn't have
a Yeah, he's taking some wild things from his experience.
The medical logic behind all of this is also rooted
in Bruno's writing about concentration camps. In a letter to
the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,

(14:12):
Bruno's friend Alvin Rosenfeld explained of Bruno's beliefs quote, Bettelheim
showed the world how extreme abuse such as concentration camp
incarceration could severely distort personalities. That formed the basis of
his treatment model and laid the foundation for much of
our thinking about child abuse and post traumatic stress disorder.
And there is an aspects of this that are positive

(14:32):
and that are undeniably accurate. One of Bettelheim's legitimate achievements
is that he is an early proponent of the idea
that if you are working with emotionally disturbed or mentally
ill children and they are engaging in behavior that you
don't want them to engage in, your first task is
to understand the internal logic of the child. Why do

(14:53):
they think this is a good idea?

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right?

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Why? Why are they choosing to act in this way, right,
that you should seek to figure out why they want
to do things. Right, In other words, what's going on
in the kid's head is important. You know. That is
a fairly unique idea at the time, right, And that's
that's a legitimate, you know, positive step.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
And also I imagine what are they getting out of it,
right that, like, what is reinforcing this behavior?

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Right? Yes, I think that that's a big part of it,
and that's overall like a good direction to be going. Unfortunately,
Bettelheim has another belief, and it's one that he will
talk openly about. This idea that like, you need to
understand why the child is making that is doing the
things that they're doing, their internal logic. He will also
say the whole time, you should never use physical punishment

(15:42):
on kids. That you don't do it, there's no cause
for it. The entire time he is working at this,
he is running this school, He is physically punishing these kids.
He just lies about it to parents and to academics
by saying, don't do this, we never do this. The
whole time he is using physical and mentally abuse, to
be very clear, right, And it's interesting to me that

(16:03):
he knows he has to deny it, right, cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
So yeah, yeah, because because it's one thing to believe,
like I think physical you know, punishment gets good results,
but to know that to like also know enough to
be like, no one will like that, or that's actually
not true, but that's what I want to do to
get the quickest results, or yeah, it's horrifying. I mean

(16:32):
it is very interesting. Like all research shows that any storm,
any form of physical punishment is not helpful, right, even
spanking has been like proven that it is not good.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
It's interesting to me that if he were to have
said at this time, obviously you spank kids, you know,
sometimes you slap them a little bit, that would not
have been controversial. That would have been in the forties,
well within the standards of like normal childhood education. Right.
The fact that he's like, no, no, no, you should
never do this, but is still doing it is so

(17:06):
interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
He's a deeply troubled man.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah. This guy. Alvin Rosenfeld, who was Bruno's colleague and friend,
defends the fact that kind partly defends the fact that
Bettelheim uses physical violence. He argues that unlike most institutions
at the time. The Orthogenic school didn't use shock therapy,
it didn't have restraints or any other violent tools, but
sometimes the kids were so out of control that they

(17:29):
needed physical intervention, and Bruno courageously handled that unpleasant task
for his subordinates, assuring that quote they were free to
be far more nurturing. He admits that Bettelheim sometimes meted
out punishment that included slaps, but he frames this as
minor for the era. Now, I won't say that like
what he did was extreme for the era, but it

(17:50):
wasn't mild, right, And we have a lot of reports
from kids who were with him during this period of time,
and they do not report a mild experience. And I
don't talk about this a lot on the show because
I'm not an ex or an educator. But i did
work in special let as a paraprofessional for the better
part of two years, and I'm unwilling to give detailed
stories on the air for reasons that should be obvious

(18:10):
and relate primarily to the privacy rights of those children.
But I will say that I dealt with primarily kids
who were frequently violent and who were about my size. Right,
These are seventeen, eighteen, nineteen twenty year olds, and many
of them are non The term we would use at
the time was nonverbal. And because of my size, I
worked with these kids very closely because I could take

(18:32):
a hit, and I was hit every day on that job. Right,
one of my colleagues suffered a near fatal injury a TBI.
Another had a broken jaw. So this was a I
understand sometimes you have to use restraints to protect yourself
and others. Right with kids who and some of the
kids were what we would call emotionally disturbed, there were
a variety of diagnoses that you had there. I'm aware

(18:56):
of the needs sometimes to restrain kids, and so I
want to emphasize that's not what's going on with Bruno.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
For one thing, restraining is sometimes there's force involved in
restraining a kid. It's not violent. Your job is not
to harm them physically. Your job is to stop them
from causing harm to themselves and others, and sometimes the
only way to do that is to like physically hold
them so that they can't hit somebody or whatever. Right,
this is like a very difficult thing to do and

(19:24):
to talk about. I really don't know how to get
across like, I'm very empathetic to the people who are
good at this job, and I want to emphasize I
had no training in it. We simply don't get training
like that's another a major, massive problem. Or if it's
very like I had a four hour class on like
physical restraint and none of it, none of it was
functional stuff.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
And there's also different types of restraints and some are
more harmful than others.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yes, yes, and you know, as it was fifteen years ago,
I think it was very primitive and not we were
not adequately trained to do the job. I can only
imagine how bad it was in the forties. But again,
what Bruno is doing here, None of the stories that
I have from other kids are he had to make

(20:13):
difficult choices because a kid was violent and presented a
danger to others. They are all he was annoyed a
behavior and so he hit a child, you know, that
is what Bruno and I really want to emphasize. I'm
not naive about like the complex choices that have to
be made sometimes here, That's not what's going on with Bruno.
What he is doing to these kids a sadistic physical

(20:34):
abuse on a level that I have trouble comprehending. One
of Bruno's students is a kid named Ronald Angres. He
spent twelve years at the Orthogenic School, during which he
rarely saw his family. Bruno believed it was bad for
students to have regular contact with loved ones, and he
pushed heavily for parents to keep their kids enrolled there
for the entirety of their childhood. Right, you are abusing

(20:55):
your kid if you try to take them back and
raise them in your home, that's bad for them. I
have to have total control over them for the whole time.
Their children. Not a great sign there.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Anytime, anytime there's an encouragement for a child not to
have direct communication with their parents, something bad has happening.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
So that's that's such a good point that like anytime
someone is being like no, no, no, you really shouldn't
see your kid, they're doing something fucked up, right, That's
just that's just yeah, very probably a very durable truth.
Speaking of durable truths, here's some ads.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
We're back, So.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
We're talking about this this an article written by one
of Bruno's students, Ronald Onngres. Angres was diagnosed by Bettelheim
as autistic. We almost I will say, certainly, I think
would not apply that diagnosis to Angress today, because his
primary symptoms were that, like, he was bad at sports,
he was a little slow learning how to read, and
he like fidgeted sometimes, he had a thing for daydreaming.

(22:01):
Everything that he describes is what I would call like, Okay, well,
you're just a kid. Some kids take longer to learn
to read than others. Some kids aren't good at sports.
I wasn't good at some kids fidget, you know. None
of that is what I would call like or what
I think any expert would say, like diagnostic criteria for anything,
really right, Like they're not saying like he was not

(22:22):
incapable of like learning how to read or anything. He's
just a little slower than others. Fairly normal kid, right.
But Agra's father was a psychoanalyst himself, and a rich
one at that, and he'd diagnosed his child as disturbed
for a variety of utterly anodyne reasons. Quote, sometimes I
skipped while I paced. I had other unacceptable mannerisms too.

(22:42):
I sometimes talk to myself, lips moving when lost in thought. Again,
these just sounds like things people do, like such an.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Urge to overpathologize.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah, yeah, your kids like just talking to himself like
children do.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
Like. I also feel like there's sometimes what happens is
like the expectations people have for how children should behave
is not realistic, so that it's like, oh, your kid
didn't sit through a four hour movie without like wanting
to get up and fidgeting. Something's wrong with them. It's like, no, developmentally,
they're not going to be able to do that. That's

(23:19):
a normal reaction.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Totutely normal for it, and that so much of what's
going on here is that these are rich parents and
they are annoyed that their kids maybe need a little
bit of extra help, maybe aren't immediately ready to go
to fancy dinner parties or the met or something right.
And so they're like, well, I'm just gonna have you.
I'm going to lock you up with this guy, this weirdo.
That seems like they they're.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Children and they're only interested in adults. They just want
their kids to act like an adult. I look cute.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I am a rich professional in the nineteen forties. I
have highballs to drink, in binzos to eat. You know,
I have no time to raise my own children. So
Ronald's father's sense of professional ethics meant that he couldn't
treat his own son. The Orthogenic School has a reputa
had a reputation, has a reputation. It's still around for

(24:05):
feeding children very well. This is a again, this is
a high dollar institution. They have excellent food. It is
an excellent space. It is a very immaculately clean There
is every kind of like piece of educational equipment is
all state of the art, right, very nice furniture. This
is a nice place. Right. I really need to emphasize
that if you look at it as a rich guy,

(24:27):
you will be impressed at the quality of the facility itself. Now,
Bruno would claim all his life that no child was
ever admitted to the Orthogenic School without having a chance
to visit and decide for themselves to consent to come.
Ronald says, bullshit. He was interviewed, but yeah, he says,
I was interviewed by Bruno, But I would never have

(24:49):
consented to go to that school, because from the moment
we met, he was cruel and belittled me. Quote. I
drew for him a picture of a man I don't
remember now if he asked me to. But all the
psychologists seem to rave such pictures, and I may have
tried in this fashion to break the ice. What a
stupid and ugly picture, he snapped. I did not yet know.
He fancied himself an art connoisseur. You did not draw

(25:09):
his hands there behind his back, I explained, You just
did that because you can't draw hands. Do you know
what it means when a boy can't draw hands? I
did not. I still don't.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
What the fuck does that mean?

Speaker 2 (25:21):
What does it mean?

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Bruno? Hands like hard, it's really difficult to draw hands.

Speaker 5 (25:33):
Yeah, wow, so much anger, just like he's such a
such a angry view of the world, like such a
It's so funny these people that like their whole goal
is to like get people to act correctly.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, are so emotionally unregulated themselves. Yes, yes, like he
got so outraged that this little boy didn't draw him.
You need to go do some deep breathing. Yeah, Bruno,
not appropriate reactions that you're happening.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
What doesn't mean when a child can't draw? And I
want to continue that write up to appease him. I
redrew the picture and added some hands, carefully showing all
five fingers. Preposterous. You drew the hands entirely out of proportion.
They're bigger than his head. Once more, he scowled darkly,
as if I were expected to know the sinister significance
of such a reversal of normal proportions. He asked, what

(26:29):
I hope to become when I grew up a scientist?
I replied, ridiculous. He's spat you want to be a scientist?
You can't even read again? This is a child, Holy fuck.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Villain out of a Bond movie?

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Is what is going on here? Bruno? From the standards
of a period of time in which parenting was shall
we say rough, like that is bad child rearing.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
It's also very funny to like, like imply that the
children were allowed to give consent and had to give consent,
Given that at that time period, I think the idea
that children could give consent or should was like not
a normal concept.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Like the idea that adults could give consent wasn't really
a normal concept.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
But like, I feel like very few families like view
children at that time as as autonomous individuals who were
worthy of giving consent, you know, so like, no way
was that happening, And.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
It's such a weird thing that he would insist on
like telling. The lies he chooses to tell are always
very strange to.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Me, but they also they also are revealing of how
much he actually knows of what he's doing is wrong.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yes, yes, that's a very good point that he does
understand that this should be a thing the child consents to.
He just doesn't give a fuck.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
So or maybe it's some guilt that he is has
and so his lies are around the things he feels
shame regret around, and so he's lying to himself. Who knows.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
If I tell the lie, I can normalize the behavior
I know is good, even if I fall in short. Right,
maybe it's something like that.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
Oh yeah, like maybe I well, I'm not doing it,
but I'm but I'm putting that out in the world. Right,
But I actually think this guy might think he is
doing it. I mean, I think there might be just
such a disconnect between Hi, Yeah, his actions and who
he thinks he is.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, I think that might that may in fact be
the case. Onngres calls him rude after this point. Fair
point to the kid, and he later wrote that he
would have been utterly shattered if he'd known then that
he was about to spend the remainder of his childhood
in Bruno's care, so his parents send him to the school.
When he starts at the Orthogenic school, he's allowed to
bring his favorite toys and the like with him. His

(28:42):
prized possessions are his comic books, and as soon as
Bruno sees them, he announces a new rule, no comic books.
He also takes issue with one of Ronald's toys, a
wooden train, which he called stupid man, it's a train.
What the fund?

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Now?

Speaker 2 (29:01):
This is all pretty abusive, but by far the worst thing. Well, honestly,
I don't know if it's all pretty bad, but he
also uses physical violence against little kids. Here's how Angres
later described his treatment at Bruno's hands. I lived for
years in terror of his beatings and abject animal terror.
I never knew when he would hit me, or for
what or how savagely. Bettelheim prized his unpredictability no less

(29:24):
than his unconventionality as someone who saw the secret depths
of men's souls. He glorified in defying ordinary notions of
which offenses were important, or even what constituted an offense,
what hostile character, he would say of me and countless
other boys as he beat us publicly. These beatings, which
made the greatest impression on me of anything that I
have known in life, stick in my memory as a

(29:44):
grand performance of exultant rage. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
I mean, look, I think we're learning that that going
through the amount of trauma that that Bruno went through,
when you don't like treat.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
It or in any way deal with it.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah, and when you then kind of claim psychology as
something that you have ownership over when you actually haven't
done any work on yourself can be a really a
really nasty outcome.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
And yeah, it's it's interesting to me. It is probably
worth really re emphasizing that he is not this way
with that first kid. Now, he doesn't really spend much
time parenting her, right, he's working, But that kid that
he helps to raise in Austria, he's not hitting, at
least she doesn't. She does not recall him being anything
like this, right.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Well, he hadn't been in the camp yet.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
He hadn't been in the camp yet, Yeah, he hadn't.
I wonder how much of it is the camp and
how much of it is like he hadn't made himself
remade himself as a psychoanalytic expert yet right, and I
don't think you'll ever you can ever like know you
know which of these did more. But he's obviously he's
a very different guy in terms of how he treats

(31:07):
children after the camps, and that's something that really deserves
to be kind of reemphasized. To continue with Onngres's story,
once some all school games were organized, we played musical chairs.
A boy I shall call Seymour jumped into a seat
before I could, and from then on until the end
of the game, which I had to watch from the sidelines,
he silently taunted me, smirking and wiggling his behind in

(31:28):
time to the music, which bumps in my direction. After
the game finished, Seymour approached me with that gloating smirk
still on his face. I said, I wish I could
chop your head off the councilor promptly told Bettelheim, who
just as promptly beat me, adding neck chops to his
standard slaps and a denunciatory monologue in case I missed
the poetic justice of it all. And again, you see,
like pretty normal kid to say something like that, not

(31:50):
a weird thing. For a kid to say, this is
a thing where you need to sit both of those
kids down and dock to them. He like mock cuts
his head off by hitting him in the neck, which
also you just, I mean, you shouldn't hit kids at all,
but you certainly shouldn't hit children in the neck.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, my dog likes to like walk on me in
the morning, and yeah, when he puts his paw on
my neck, I'm like, ow, that's such a sensitive Luckily,
until I got this dog, I didn't understand how much
neck pressure hurts.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, and like the fucking uh. I mean, we can
talk about choke chains and the like, which are also
common at the time, but like the kind of immediate
willingness where he's like, this kid talked about cutting other
kid's head off, Obviously the right thing to do is
hit him in the neck, you know. Like that's a
very telling logical leap that he makes there. Now, these

(32:44):
stories that Augres tells are very consistent with the stories
multiple other former students give of their time under Bruno's tutelage,
and they are also they also comport with the stories
of employees who work as teachers and staff members at
the Orthogenic schooling this time. One of those former staff
members was a guy who wrote about his experiences for
The Chicago Reader under the pseudonym WB. I find his

(33:08):
account valuable in part because Bruno's friend and defender, Alvin Rosenfeld,
acknowledges that Bruno used physical violence, but also insists that
most of the complaints from students, which he views is unfair,
came from later in Bruno's career, and so he's like, well,
they were angry because like he was, you know, he
kind of died before their education could finish. And so

(33:29):
they they, you know, they're they're transmitting feeling their feelings
of abandonment to like claiming he was abusive. And this
guy's account puts the light of that. For one thing.
WB comes to work at the school early on in
Bruno's tutelage there, and he is a World War II
combat veteran. So this is not a guy who is
inclined to be shocked by violence, right, Like, if this

(33:52):
guy reacts to your violence, you're really out of fucking pocket, right. Quote.
A number of us wereveterans who had probably seen more
of life by age twenty one than Bettelheim had seen
at age forty. I do disagree with that because he
was in the camps man, but this guy's got definitely
has like a bit of an axe to grind with Bettelheim.

(34:14):
That fact never seemed to penetrate Bettelheim's low threshold of
awareness of the true nature of the world around him.
He tried to bully the counselors as much as he
did the defenseless children.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
In the school.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
He was just a bit more circumspect with US veterans. Now.
He notes this guy that most orthogenic school employees were women,
and that is a real thing Bruno does. He likes
to be surrounded by women, and these folks are very
loyal to Bruno. WB describes the female employees at the
school as like his Roman cohorts, So these are like

(34:44):
his power base, these female counselors, who Rosenfeld is like.
That's why Bruno had to do all the physical violence
was so that these women could be free to be
more nurturing, which is a very odd vibe, but that's
the way people describe it. Quote and this is from
w B. The understanding that most of the men had
was that Bettelheim tried to seduce everyone and too relating

(35:07):
to him as their therapist. This was a condition of
job tenure. Our general feeling was that most of the
women accepted this relationship, but we never knew for sure.
Their job tenure was certainly longer than most of the men's.
I would characterize the atmosphere at the Orthogenic School at
that time as the beginnings of a cult, with doctor
b as the cult leader. And I find that interesting

(35:28):
because he notes accurately, this guy that part of cult
dynamics is the creation of new vocabulary and the redefinition
of existing vocabulary to create a new reality in which
cult members live under. And this is how WB explains
Bruno's use of terms like emotionally disturbed, autistic, and schizophrenic.

(35:49):
These are not real medical diagnoses, but these are terms
reinvented by Bruno to create a reality that's convenient to him, right.
And he will say he has an eighty five percent
success rate in treating schizophrenia and autism, and that eighty
five percent of the kids that came into his school
left it without these diagnoses. He's not curing these people.

(36:12):
He is desclaring them to have a thing and then
declaring them cured when they behave in a way that
he describes as idealized, right, And that's kind of key
to it, is that he gets described as brilliant for
a while because of this big eighty five percent success rate.
He is the only person judging these kids.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Well, it's I mean, this is like a thing that
happens in society, these like the troubled teen industry, like that.
This is not like an isolated incident of this kind
of group where these kids are declared as so problematic
and then taken into this extreme environment and then you
sort of have a cult like figure at the helm

(36:51):
and all of these employees sort of just like go
along with this, even though it's like it is like
this dynamic that sort of has that continues to sort
of out and so there are definitely like, I'm someone
who finds, like, I don't think it's so wild to
describe things as cults or as they like if they

(37:13):
follow certain you know, uh, descriptors. This this definitely feels
feels rather culty to me.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
If the kool aid bowl fits right.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, I mean the difference is that these kids are
not are not members of the cult the way you
would see in other situations. They're they're sort of the
prisoners of the cult.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, and I think WB is trying to describe a
lot of the employees.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
Employees are the members.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Although the financial relationship again and he's like, it's I
don't really know how much did they buy it? Did
they just need the job?

Speaker 4 (37:45):
Right?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Like it was unclear to him and it will be
forever to us. But I do find it noteworthy that
he says this, Bettelheim was a professional success. Why simple
He defined a child's problem without any meaningful critical peer
review and then proceeded to solve the problem again without
critical review. A generally compliant and emotionally dependent staff then
put their im premature on his self declared and widely

(38:08):
proclaimed success. And yeah, and it's it's.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah, he's creating the rules of the world.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
He gets and the world is a lot, it's a
lot easier. Life is much easier when you get to
do that. Now. While when Bruno directs the Orthogenic School,
he's also kind of the doctor phil of like the
forties through the fifties, sixties, you know, to some extent
in like the seventies, and that he's he's a constant
presence on TV and he is brought in as an

(38:37):
expert on disturbed children when there's a horrible crime, you know,
when there's He's also brought in to talk about concentration
camps anti Semitism, and this is deeply unfortunate because Bruno
is not really an expert on disturbed children, and he's
increasingly identifies himself as white and identifies his old Jewish

(38:57):
identity as problematic, and so the fact that he is
a major public figure on all of these things is
a real issue. Near the end of the nineteen forties,
he's asked to speak at hellel House on modern anti Semitism,
and he told the assembled almost entirely Jewish audience, anti Semitism.
Whose fault is it yours? Because you don't assimilate. It's
your fault. If you assimilated, there would be no anti Semitism.

(39:19):
Why don't you assimilate? Now, people don't take this lying down.
This is offensive to the audience.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
This is like satire, Like holy shit, man, what.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
And one member of the audience, Eric Schopter, is like,
wait a second. If you're saying the solution to anti
Semitism is to Jewishness, what makes you different from an
anti Semite? And Bruno responds, I'm only a doctor prescribing
the cure, not an answer. Well, he is, yeah, that's
that's that's I mean problematic.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
I had this great professor in grad school, who's you know,
because psychology is a tricky field, like we are alluding to,
like there can really be an unequal level of power,
and these people that claim to like know everything. And
he was always like, if anyone tells you that they're
certain about anything, like the way he goes on these

(40:17):
TV shows and is like certain about these disturbed children,
do not trust them.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
That is very good advice, and it's in particularly in
Bruno's case because as the years go on, he becomes
one of the first public intellectual experts on autism. Right
in nineteen sixty seven he publishes a book called The
Empty Fortress, which is one of the first influential and
famous books on the treatment of children with autism in
US history. Now again remind you Brunos, PhD. Is not

(40:45):
in any relevant medical discipline and that, so far as
we know, he mostly lied about his psychoanalytic credentials in Austria.
The Empty Fortress, in his book's title, relates to what
Brunos saw as the cause of autism. And I'm going
to quote from a write up by the Auto as
a History Project. Children took shelter there from the cruelty
and indifference of their parents, mothers especially, who were supposed

(41:06):
to love them but instead denied their humanity. The cost
was impossibly high. Forced into rational solitude behind walls that
shielded them from the very people whose attention they craved.
Babies were frozen out of normal development. In other words,
he believed autism came from your mom ignoring you.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Right, yep, Wow, that's so original. Yeah, that's like, you know,
out of nowhere, the moms.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
So he saw the primary cause of autism as refrigerator mothers.
These are emotionally cold and distant women. And he again,
he'll describe his mom as one of these later in life,
you know, I mean, he starts to do it around this time. Now.
One allegation that you'll find here is that Bruno takes
his mommy issues and turns them into what was for years.

(41:54):
This is never the standard explanation for the origins of
autism in the medical sense, but because of Bruno's prominence,
it's a very common explanation. Right, because people hear this
on TV. They see the book and they're like, oh, okay,
that must be it. Now. Responsible articles today will note
accurately that this is horseshit. The origins of autism are

(42:14):
almost certainly genetic and one not caused by your mom
being a refrigerator vaccine. It's very important to note also
not caused by that.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
I also feel like historically people often blame schizophrenia on
mothers too. Yes, and it makes sense that those are
the two main things that he's treating.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yes, yes, And it's also worth noting that autism was
often called childhood schizophrenia at the time too, Like these
are these terms are very much again, I really need
to re emphasize that. I also should emphasize that even
articles today often say very fucked up things about autism.
I want to read an excerpt from a twenty twenty

(42:55):
one article in the Chicago Tribune about Bruno Bettelheim and
about him getting the causes of autism wrong. Quote. Even
a quick look at children who are abused and neglected
by parents should make it obvious that autism is a
completely different kind of problem. Eventually, autism will probably be
treated with gene therapy or effective medications will be developed
to counter the defect. Now, that's just eugenics, right, that's

(43:18):
just eugenics that you wrote in twenty twenty one, guy
at the Chicago Tribune, that's just eugenics.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Gosh, call it like explicitly calling your dmail no heh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a I mean, there continues to be so much
debate about like ABA therapy for children and autism. I'm
sure you probably in the work you did in special

(43:45):
had experienced a lot of that. And it's the difference
of approaches between we have to change this person to
interact with the world as we see fit, versus maybe
we allow this person to be who they are and
create a world where that's okay.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, and there's yeah, this is something that is still developing.
I want to note I just read that bad article
and was like, oh my god, man, you're not any
better than Bruno was, dude. I mean, I guess like
this is still a real problem that this podcast is
not going to kind of deal with in all of

(44:26):
the depth that it deserves. But I wanted to make
a note of that. In his piece for Commentary magazine,
Ronald Andres makes a note that even though the state
of autism treatment and knowledge was more primitive at the time,
there was ample evidence in the early days to suggest
that Bruno's empty fortress hypothesis was nonsense. Quote. In fact,
there was always evidence that autism may be at least

(44:47):
partially neurological. Everyone before Bettelheim believed it was. No one
but Bettelheim and his most fervent followers ever believed otherwise.
And even on Bettelheim's assumption that the origins were psychological
rather than biological or neurological, well, why go on as
he did to accuse parents of such crimes, such schizophrenic symptoms,
as wishing their child did not exist. Bettelheim made an

(45:08):
art of accusation. He did not sort of blame victims.
He set himself up as their special prosecutor. Right yeah,
which is an interesting and a damning way to describe that.
I think this is our second ad break, so let's
just go for it. We're back. So it has been

(45:30):
noted that Bruno's victim blaming of concentration camp attornees bore
more than a little resemblance to the way he talked
about the parents of quote unquote autistic children. The identification
of the aggressor, which he saw as core to the
behavior of inmates, is also what he believed went on
with autism. Kids with so called refrigerator moms aped that
behavior and locked away their emotions from the empty fortress.

(45:52):
This is Bruno was writing here. I had experienced being
at the mercy of forces that seemed beyond one's ability
to influence, and with no knowledge of whether or when
the experience would end. Of living isolated from family and friends,
of being severely restricted, and the sending and receiving of information.
Perhaps this sudden reversal helped me first to understand how
the camps could destroy personality, and later to resume with
I hope greater insights and empathy. My earlier task that

(46:15):
of creating a milieu which would favor the reconstruction of personality.
Right And this is him literally being like the camps
taught me that I could cure autism by making my
own camp. Right Now. Violence was not his only tool
for reconstructing personality, but insults and mockery were among his
go to tactics, and behind every effort he made was

(46:37):
the promise of violence. This is why he pushed parents
to enroll their children and his facility for the entirety
of their childhood. He needed the privacy of total control
to ensure he was not stopped. From that write up
and Disability Studies Quarterly. One former student called it a
dumping ground for young people who were different in some
way or who for whatever reason, didn't match their parents' expectations.

(46:58):
Bettelheim was known to slap punched children. He would often
tell his students that they were at the Orthogenic School
because their parents couldn't stand them. He called them megalomaniacs
and neurotics and forced them into uncomfortable or violent situations
against their will. Children were expected to shower naked in
front of the staff and one another throughout their stay,
regardless of age or comfort level, and many students and

(47:20):
staff were physically and sexually abused. Jacqueline Sanders worked for
Bettelheim for thirteen years and became the director of the
school after Bettlheim left. She rights we became the abusers
of abused children.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
I mean sort of going back to what we were saying,
like that the victims are not just the kids there,
it's probably also the staff that are sort of in
like under this man's control and manipulation. And it's I mean,
it's a mini little hell that he has been built.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
He has created a little hell for kids and for
staff members. Yeah yeah. Sudents at this school were expected
to work towards admission to higher education, and the school
had an excellent record for this, which has led some defenders,
including former students, who like most will say his violence
was unacceptable, to declare the school overall still a success.

(48:15):
And this brings me to the book The Creation of
Doctor b by Richard Pollock. One criticism that he will
get from Bettelheim's defenders is that, given his own history
with the school, he can't be objective. You see, Richard's brother, Stevens,
started out as a day student at the Orthogenic School,
but Bettelheim insisted, as always, that he come to live
there full time. Richard writes, over the months, he made

(48:36):
fewer and fewer visits home, becoming from me a kind
of spectral sibling, even before his death in nineteen forty eight. Now,
Stephen's death occurred when he was away from the school
on a rare holiday visit with his family. He and
his brother were staying at a farm owned by a
friend of the family, and he fell through a hayshoe
several stories to the ground and died on impact. If
you grew up on a farm, you immediately are like, oh, yeah,

(48:58):
that's absolutely how a little kid could do. Right. It's
one of the most dangerous things in any kind of farm,
as a hayshoot. It's just this hole that's going to
be covered by hay a lot of the time, and
if you go through it, you can fall quite a distance.
So Bettelheim refuses to accept Oh, a tragic accident occurred, right.
He blames Rick and Stephen's parents for killing their son

(49:21):
because they wanted to spend time with him and they
should have just left him at the school full time.
Now decades later, Bettelheim still holds onto this grudge because
in the late night again this happens in forty eight.
In the late nineteen eighties, Pollock, who's writing a book
about Bettelheim, calls on him, and Bettelheim still remembers these
parents and is still angry at them. Quote my father,

(49:42):
he dismissed his crude and somewhat simple minded, a Schlemiel
who played the bills and stayed out of emotional problems.
My mother was the villain. He said she paraded as
a saint and a martyr, when in fact she was
almost entirely responsible for my brother's problems with astonishing anger.
He said she had rejected Stephen at birth and that
to cope with this locke out, he had developed pseudo
feeble mindedness. He said that my brother was a lovely

(50:04):
child who manifested a sensitivity my mother wished she possessed,
and he castigated her for never conceding that she was
responsible for Steven's dispress distress and for insisting against the
school's wishes that he'd be allowed periodic home visits.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
It's interesting that everyone has the exact same problem.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
That everyone has the problem.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Is the same. Yeah, and it's weird that it's also
the damanic he came from.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah. I mean their dad was like his dad, Their
mom was like his mom. Wild stuff, so Bettelheim declares
in this conversation with no evidence, No, your brother committed
suicide because he was so unhappy with your parent. Again,
he fell through a hayshoot man. He insinuated the fact
that their mom worked full time was part of why

(50:53):
their brother killed himself, and he ranted, what is it
about these Jewish mothers, mister Polock and his book. Richard
continued in nineteen fifty six, I would discover he had
written that the school had warned my parents that a
home visit for Stephen was ill advised because he might
harm himself. Despite our objection, the visit took place, and
the child died in a carefully contrived accident. Bettelheim told

(51:16):
me with other utter confidence that Stephen had once purposefully
fallen out of a speedboat near the propellers, and it
was only a matter of time before he found a
situation like the loft in which his efforts at killing
himself would succeed. In fact, my brother had never fallen
out of any boat, And that anecdote really says a
lot that he just will lie to this kid about
his brother's death for no reason, not for no reason,

(51:38):
because inventing fiction lets him redefine reality, right, And that's
the essence of his pedagogy, right, is you get to
define the reality for these children and thus of the world.
Like that's how maybe you know this is to some
extent him taking back control over the world, which was
so chaotic for him, But I don't know, Like that's fascinating.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
If something doesn't fit his narrative, then he will create
the details to make it fit exactly, which is a
really great strategy for you, but it's for him. Yeah.
It also allows him to never have to confront any
of his own demons.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
No, and he's such a so. During the Vietnam War,
Bruno makes a name for himself as an anti anti
war activist, and confoundingly, he describes the kids protesting against
Vietnam as neo Nazis who were very sick and paranoias,
trying to beat down father to show they are a
big boy. Oh my god, I don't know if that's

(52:43):
what's to me. They don't want to get drafted and
go die and denanying man.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
Like I feel like this is like should be like
a learning like a learning moment about these people that
take over our media today. Yeah, Like there are so
many people like with these kinds of characteristics and these
really abhorrent personalities who people fall for, yep, and to

(53:10):
become like really influential and claim to have a lot
of knowledge around wellness and psychology and the right way
to be a person. And it's just a reminder to
be more skeptical of what people present to you as
the truth.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Maybe don't trust those people. Yeah, in nineteen seventy six,
you had asked it in part one, when does the
backlash against a lot of what he's saying about the Holocaust?

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Again?

Speaker 2 (53:36):
And as I said it, there's some immediately, but kind
of there's a big chunk of academic backlash starts in
the late seventies when American Holocaust scholar Terence de Prez
writes a book about the survivors of death camps and
concentration camps. His book, The Survivor was partly a broadside
against the misinformation Bettelheim had contributed to the discussion, and

(53:58):
I want to quote now from an article by Paul Rosen.
Throughout The Survivor criticized Bettelheim for having supposed that it
was correct to have thought that prisoners ever regressed to infantilism.
Depress believed that the survivors should be viewed as reminders
not of human weaknesses, but of evil circumstances that were
objectively powerful. Both the Nazis and Stalin's regime subjected prisoners

(54:19):
to filth for the sake of humiliation and debasement. Depress
argued that prisoner behavior in response to such circumstances was
not childish, but rather a heroic response to dreadful necessities.
He cited one camp where the inmates burned it down
and found throughout the literature instances of people who somehow
managed to maintain their inward sanctity. Resistance took subtle shapes,

(54:40):
and Dupress explored the way human dignity endured and the
form of freedom from the entire control by external forces.
Survivors helped one another, engaged in acts of sabotage, and
from Bukenwald made contact with the Allies for a bombing
rate on ss parts of the camp. Depress pointed out
that Bettelheim was imprisoned during a special period when criminals
among inmates wielded power. He disputed Bettelheim's notion that social

(55:04):
bonding among prisoners was absent, nor was it true. Depress
argued that they did not hate their repressors and did
not sometimes revolt. According to Depress, Bettelheim had felt superior
to his fellow's sufferers, and his account was factually marred
by his egotistical obsession with autonomy that blinded him to
the extent of the mutual support that existed within.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
The camps.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
Sounds right to me.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Sounds accurate to me now. Bettelheim responds with an article
in The New Yorker arguing that Press's Depress's book missed
the realities of the experience, and Depressed responds a little
later with an article of his own called the Bettelheim Problem.
He links Bruno's conclusions about the causes of autism and
schizophrenia to his supposed observations about camp life. In a way,

(55:47):
he seemed to be taking out his righteous anger on
the ss guards on the parents of his students. The
ultimate product of this was that these people who lived
for years without their children had to do so believing
they were the ultimate cause of their children's problems, right,
which is bad.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
In nineteen eighty And also it's also a great manipulation tactic,
right because as soon as you're like, hey, maybe I
shouldn't let this kid be in the school for their
entire childhood, it's like, oh, well, actually, though I'm the
person causing them harm, if I were to reunite with
my kid, I'd actually be.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Doing them more harm, right, right, exactly, that's a very
good point, right, And that's such a key part of
what Beddlheim is saying is that like you have fucked
your kids up. You gave them these conditions. Only I
can fix them, right, it.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Becomes dangerous for you to be involved in their life.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
And that's why when this mom, when Richard his biographer's
like mom, insists that her other son at least gets
sometime with the family, Bruno has to turn around and
make that kid's death be caused by thealy right. In
nineteen eighty five, Bruno's wife, Truday passed on, despite his
early some early infidelities, who was by all accounts dedicated

(57:01):
to his wife, and most people who knew him will
say that her passing broke him. He was by this
point an old man in poor health, and so on
March thirteenth, nineteen ninety, Bruno Bettelheim took his own life. Now,
the fact that he committed suicide was just about the
most understanding thing he ever did. He was old, he
was ailing. He would write a lot about the fact
that he no longer felt he could be of service

(57:23):
to society, and so I don't have trouble understanding why
he did this, But the fact that he killed himself
sent a shock through the psychoanalytic and educational community. And
while the criticism of him for committing suicide was unjust,
which is a big part of the initial reaction to
his death as people being like, oh, well, the fact
that a psychoanalyst would do this must have meant that

(57:43):
he was never He wasn't as healthy as he portrayed
himself as being, and that's bad. That's a bad way
to look at the suicide of an old man whose
wife just died and he was in poor health. It
also weirdly opens up the floodgates for the survivors of
his teaching practices to talk about what they had endured.
And that's why things are kind of messy, is that

(58:03):
the first wave of criticism of Bettelheim happens alongside people
criticizing him for committing suicide, which is messy, But you
do get a lot of these survivors start talking in
nineteen ninety and continue talking up to the present day.
Like there's again some of the writings that I found
on this was like much more recent as a result
of the fact that, like, you know, people are still

(58:25):
processing this. There's folks who initially were like well, but no,
the school was a good thing for me overall, who
kind of come to different conclusions. There's also still plenty
of schools who were like, yeah, it was brutal at times,
but students who were like, it was brutal, but it
prepared me for success. I'm not going to judge how
anybody interprets their own experience at this school. I will

(58:46):
say one of the things people say for Bruno, which
is that so many of his graduates went on to
have excellent careers. Well yeah, but also all their parents
were super rich. I don't know if we give that
to Bruno a right, like their parents were all rich
as hell. Maybe that had more to do with it.
I don't know, like not to take anything away from them,
but I don't. I just don't know that I give
that to Bruno.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Like I also, I'm not surprised like you that he
died by suicide, because I don't think he was mentally
well his whole life. No, God, no, I don't think
that he was ever at peace with himself or had
like the ability to emotionally regulate or you know, live

(59:28):
a values driven life like I think he wasn't in
constant turmoil since his childhood and so unfort the the
outcome is not is not so shocking to me?

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Nope, nope, not at all. Well that's the story, uh
how we feel it.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
Oh, I guess I'll do my annoying mental health advocacy
thing of of saying I veer away from using the
term committed suicide because it implies that it's a crime,
and so I prefer like the language of died by suicide. Sure,
just but you know, who would I be for not

(01:00:12):
someone to say that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
You know, And honestly, like, uh, it's interesting because I
hadn't I never really thought about the fact that like, yeah,
using the term committing does imply that, like there's a crime.
That's because we only use that word, right, you wouldn't say,
like I committed lunch today, right, Yeah, it's just so normalized.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
Interesting, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Yeah, that's like it's interesting like as a writer and
as a also then it's someone in the mental health field.
I'm always thinking about like the impact of the word
choice that we use and like how how we are
actually like subtly sending these like messages to ourselves and
to other people. But then sometimes I'll be like I
don't get why that's the problem. But then you listen
to someone where it's you know, their point of view,

(01:00:57):
and it's like, okay, well even if I still don't
get it all, I'll make the change. But that the phrase,
when someone explained it to me in that way of
that it's like a crime, then it finally clicked for
me about why I don't want to use that term anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
Yeah, no, no, I mean I think that makes a
lot of sense. And yeah, I it's like the most
understandable like thing about his whole story, Like there's so
many choices that he makes that it's like, well, I
don't really get where that comes from. Like it's interesting
that the first thing he gets criticized for is that
and not anything about like how he treated children or whatever. Yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (01:01:38):
It just feels like a very like pertinent topic to
be talking about. Like I think that there's a sense that,
like he died in nineteen ninety, we have like a
different understanding of autism now. But I feel like we're
on a cusp of like of really not having made
the progress that we think we have made in psychology

(01:01:59):
and like moonless culture, and so it's like a reminder
to be like very vigilant about like falling for these
these people who have such extreme takes and claim to
have the only way to handle things and are very
victim blaming and you know, separate, separate people as a

(01:02:20):
means of control.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
Especially now like we are heading into a whole new
golden era. For for that. Anyway, you got any anything
you want to plug kind of at the end here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
Well you have to keep going. So if you're if
you're in the mood for something light. I have a
rom com novel called Save the Date coming out April
eighth that you can order wherever books are sold. It's
a kind of auto fiction based off of my own
broken engagement and what could have happened if I had
tried to find a new groom in time for my
original wedding. I didn't do that in real life, but

(01:02:56):
it's based off a joke my dad made and I
turned into a book. And then I also have my
self stack called Emotional Support Lady, which is all about
mental health and you can also hire me as a
relationship coach for both individuals and couples.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Yeah, awesome, awesome, Well, thank you so much for being
on today. This was a hard one to listen to.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
It.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
I appreciate yeah, you doing it so much to try
and like explain, yeah, what what was happening here? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
Right, and how and how long it took for society
to catch up to the lies?

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Geez, like half a century literally almost half.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Yeah, even though even though the people he was talking
about were saying this is wrong while was happening. Yeah,
and that wasn't enough.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Yeah, all right, Well that's the episode. Everybody, Thank you
so much, and thank you Allison. All right, have a
good week.

Speaker 4 (01:03:50):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
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Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
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