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It is more than ten years since Bruno Bettelheim ended his life in a plastic bag and unleashed a torrent of extremist opinion about the nature of the man. The author of sixteen books, Bettelheim in the midnineties was the subject of two full-length biographies in English that described him in diametrically opposite terms. Now, after what one of those biographers called “the Bettelheim affair” has disappeared from written view, another kind of biography altogether has been published, a first-person narrative of thirteen years spent as a student/patient in the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, more popularly known as Bruno Bettelheim's School.
The author, now an investment banker approaching fifty, relied not only on his memory of those years, but from sections of the over one thousand pages of transcribed notes sent to him at his request in 1992 by the director at the time. Nevertheless, Eliot reports that he did not look at those notes for another eight years after he received them, writing the first 270 pages from memory alone. The book includes a special section with excerpts from the notes, dictated by staff, which make for interesting reading.
The bulk of the book is a coming-of-age story whose merits are to be found more in the reader's possible identification with this insider's view than with any overview of treatment techniques or even