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‘As a Freudian’, Bruno Bettelheim wrote in the introduction to his last book, ‘I believe what Freud said about biographers … namely that the person who undertakes such a task “binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery”’ (p. 15). In The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, Richard Pollak repeats the same exact passage from Freud's letter of 5 May 1936 to Arnold Zweig, discouraging him from becoming Freud's biographer. Pollak, however, finds himself disagreeing with Freud: ‘I don't think’, he writes, ‘that biographers are doomed to break up on the shoals of Freud's hyperbole, but truth was clearly a problematic issue for Bettelheim’ (p. 15; my italics).
But which truth is it here; narrative or historical? And which Bruno Bettelheim, Pollak's, or another biographer's published at about the same time? Is the truth his reputation as a world-renowned child psychologist, a Freudian trained expert on the treatment of autism, or is it that Bruno Bettelheim fabricated his credentials and plagiarised much of what he wrote? After the announcement of his suicide in 1990, newspapers were flooded with reports that Bettelheim, far from having created a safe haven for the variously disturbed children under his care at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, had in fact abused some of those children as well as some of their teacher/therapists, and had run his school in some ways like the concentration camps in which he had been interred in Europe before he emigrated to America.
In this book Pollak exposes Bettelheim not only as a bully, but as a ‘psychologist’ who never had a degree in psychology, was never trained by Freud (very possibly never even met him), who became a dictatorial supervisor of therapists without ever having done any psychotherapy himself. But, Pollak tells us, Bettelheim was so widely and highly regarded, both by the masses and by many who were famous and respected in their own right, that few dared criticise him publicly.