Anne Harrington. The Cure Within: A History of Mind–Body Medicine. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. 336 pp. $25.95 (hardcover). ISBN-13: 978-0-393-06563-3
✍ Scribed by Deborah F. Johnson
- Book ID
- 102339158
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 106 KB
- Volume
- 45
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Sigmund Freud and his followers were constantly preoccupied with the future and historiography of psychoanalysis. Regarding the former, Freud wrote to his Swiss friend Oskar Pfister in November of 1928: "I do not know if you have detected the secret link between [The Question of ] Lay Analysis and [The Future of An] Illusion. In the former I wish to protect analysis from physicians and in the latter from priests. I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls [weltlichen Seelsorgern] who need not be doctors and should not be priests." That challenge has been taken up by David James Fisher, a Ph.D. historian and a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Fisher is also a student of and a participant in the history of psychoanalysis. The volume under review here collects ten of his published essays, which address the work and legacy of the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim .
A Viennese native, Bettelheim witnessed the German Anschluß of Austria in 1938, which resulted in the theft of his family business and Bruno's arrest. He survived ten months of dehumanizing brutalization at Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939 before being inexplicably released and emigrating to Chicago. There he established and ran the Orthogenic School, which took on psychiatric, particularly autistic, patients deemed untreatable. His The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (1967) was both successful and widely influential; his Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment (1976), won the National Book Award. Yet, "Bettelheim never entirely recovered from his devastating experience as an inmate in two Nazi concentration camps" (p. 83) and took his own life in March 1990, on the 52nd anniversary of the Anschluß to be exact, after which a public controversy broke out regarding the true nature of Bettelheim as a practitioner and theorist.
Fisher, "a critical admirer of Bettelheim" (p. 162), dedicates more than a third of his book to the relationship and debates between Bettelheim and the analyst Rudolf Ekstein , like Bettelheim a Viennese refugee from Hitlerian fascism. (Ekstein was Fisher's training analyst, and Fisher had a personal as well as professional relationship with Bettelheim.) Their mutual struggle to deal with the legacy of the destruction of the European culture from which they came united them despite their very different takes on the importance of milieu therapy versus psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy with autistic children, not to mention their respective positions within American psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The balance of the book includes an overview of Bettelheim's life and the impact of his work, an analysis of his texts on the Holocaust and on parents, multiple perspectives on his death and suicide, and a polemical concluding section addressing the plethora of attacks which surfaced after his demise. In addition to providing Fisher's take on these subjects, the book also includes primary documentation (unpublished letters) and an interview with Bettelheim, all of which are a historical gold mine for research into the history of psychoanalysis (the "often heroic" history of lay analysis, European immigration to the U.S., etc.). It is thus a particular shame that the book has been rather poorly copyedited, leaving distracting errors throughout.
The revelation that Bettelheim never received formal psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (or anywhere else) and the acknowledgment that he