John E. Joseph. From Whitney to Chomsky. Essays in the History of American Linguistics. Series III, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Volume 103. Amsterdam, NET and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. 234 pp. $39.95 (paperback). ISBN 1-58811-350-7.

✍ Scribed by Joseph F. Kess

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 133 KB
• Volume: 40
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10196

✦ Synopsis

Following Bruno Bettelheim's (b. 1903) suicide in March 1990, there have been three biographies of the psychoanalytic educator, former director of the Orthogenic School, and longtime faculty member and distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago (Pollak, 1997; Sutton, 1996; Raines, 2002). The Orthogenic School ("ortho" refers to correction and "genic" refers to genesis or origins) had long been a part of the university's precollegiate division, which also included the laboratory schools founded by John Dewey to study progressive education in the United Sates. Bettelheim was seldom temperate in his views regarding such contemporary social issues as parenthood and education; his books on the emotional life of children and on the dilemma of individuality in mass society reached a wide audience. As with some other intellectuals in American universities, particularly European immigrants from Nazi Germany, Bettelheim adopted a politically conservative position in the Vietnam era and was outspoken in his fear that the radicalism like that in which he had taken part in the Vienna years could once again lead to a regime like the Third Reich.

Following Bettelheim's death, there was an outcry against his controversial positions on these social issues and also his methods of helping troubled children, which involved some aspects of what might now be considered physical abuse to regain their emotional center. This controversy was sparked by letters from several former students to an alternative Chicago newspaper describing their experience of his physical abuse shortly after Bettelheim's death. These reports were picked up by the national press. It is possible that if Bettelheim had died of "natural causes" after a long struggle with a terminal illness, there would have been the usual outpouring of adulation that accompanies the death of a public intellectual. Suicide in our society is often a vengeful action designed to get even with family and friends. Bettelheim's suicide evoked feelings of rage and abandonment among many of his former students and by those who followed his advice on childrearing and education. However, paralyzed by two strokes, in his late eighties, no longer able to think clearly or write, and having witnessed the lingering, painful deaths of close friends, he had long since decided to take his own life rather than suffer the indignity of decline.

Just as with other immigrants fleeing the persecution of the Third Reich, following incarceration as a political prisoner for nearly a year in the concentration camp at Dachau, and hounded as a Jew who was forced to give up his family's considerable wealth following the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Bettelheim was grateful to America for accepting him. With a doctorate in aesthetics and psychology awarded by the University of Vienna, following his discharge from Dachau and emigration, Bettelheim's cousin, a psychoanalyst who had preceded him to America, and other close friends ultimately led him to settle in Chicago where he worked for a time on an educational research project before being appointed as director of the Orthogenic School.

Bettelheim had been fascinated from his youth by Freud's writing. He committed much of it to memory and applied Freud's insights in all aspects of his work. Bettelheim's (1982) trenchant critique of the English translation of Freud's work has inspired more recent and accessible efforts at new translations of Freud's seminal works. Many of Bettelheim's friends in Bettelheim, B. (1951).