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“Anyone who writes a biography,” Freud insisted to Arnold Zweig in 1936, “is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and, if it did we could not use it.” David James Fisher opens his study of the controversial psychoanalyst with this famous pronouncement, throwing down the gauntlet to the prevailing largely unflattering treatments of his subject. Bettelheim: Living and Dying isn't a biography per se but rather a volume with biographical tendencies, a collection of pieces written primarily about Bettelheim but also about his friend and fellow analyst . The book functions as eulogy and in fact includes memorial essays on Ekstein (Chapter 6) and Bettelheim (Chapter 9). The Ekstein-Bettelheim relationship is the subject of the longest chapter, Chapter 5, which includes reprints of twenty-two letters exchanged between them over several decades. Bettelheim: Living and Dying is also a memoir of sorts, detailing Fisher's relationship with Ekstein, his analyst for a decade, and also with Bettelheim, whom he befriended during the latter's final years. The book emerged from various essays and reviews, and all but Chapters 5 and 6 appeared previously in a 2003 German-language volume, Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen (Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul of Man). Perhaps thanks to its compositional history and its triangular energy, Bettelheim: Living and Dying is a curious book, engaging and often eloquent but not entirely persuasive as a rejoinder to Bettelheim's critics.
At the time of his suicide in 1990, Bettelheim was one of the most respected psychologists in the world, praised for his work at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago and for his writings on the Holocaust, autism, child abuse, kibbutz life, and fairy tales. Since his death, a more troubling portrait of Bettelheim has emerged, culminating in Richard Pollak's The Cre