Bruno Bettelheim, Psychoanalyst and Holocaust Survivor, Dead at 86

Bruno Bettelheim, a controversial psychoanalyst whose Holocaust experience helped shape his compassionate approach to the treatment of troubled children, died Tuesday at a retirement home in Maryland. He was 86.

Bettelheim, while revered as the progenitor of the currently accepted treatment for childhood autism, was also known as a maverick and iconoclast in the psychoanalytic world.

He is perhaps most well known in the Jewish world for his controversial theories about Holocaust survival.

A prisoner for two years in Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, Bettelheim applied his personal experiences of victimization to the human condition in his written works, including two books, “The Informed Heart” and “Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays,” an autobiography.

In his first article, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Bettelheim wrote that he was able to retain his identity in the camps because in his earlier life, he had cultivated the powers of observation and analysis.

“Psychoanalysis didn’t save my life, but it helped me survive,” Bettelheim said in a 1988 interview with Le Figaro, a French newspaper.

“Having survived concentration camps was for many a question of chance,” he said. “But the important thing was not to succumb to madness or personality disintegration. That was the Nazis’ goal.”

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDEAL

In an essay written in The New Yorker in 1976 entitled “Surviving,” Bettelheim wrote that those who survived the camps were those who lived not for life’s sake but for some cultural or religious ideal that transcended them.

Bettelheim’s controversial theories appeared in his autobiography, published in 1989. He suggested that the insular Jewish ghettos of Europe nourished an attitude of “compliance” toward Hitler, and that Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps exhibited a form of “suicidal behavior.”

As a result, he argued, “millions of people, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death. It was not only lack of knowledge that led millions to their doom; it was also an unwillingness to fight for themselves.”

Born in 1903 to a middle-class Jewish family, Bettelheim grew up in pre-World War I Vienna, a city steeped in Freudian thought at the time.

He received his training in psychology at the University of Vienna, and was just starting to experiment with autism when the Nazi annexation of Austria took place in March 1938.

Released from Dachau in 1939 after the personal intervention on his behalf by Eleanor Roosevelt and then New York Gov. Herbert Lehman, Bettelheim continued to work with childhood mental disease in Chicago.

In “The Informed Heart,” Bettelheim took his observations about the personality altercation that occurred in the concentration camps and applied it to the treatment of disturbed children.

He tried to reverse the process by creating a warm, supportive environment, which included all-day interaction, full staff care and luxuriant surroundings.