The Correspondence of Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein: 1. Introduction

The relationship between and evolved initially from a shared professional commitment to the understanding and treatment of severely disturbed children and adolescents. On an even deeper level, both were European intellectuals, deeply identified with lay analysis, who were profoundly invested in ideas and in the transmission of psychoanalytic forms of knowledge. The two had a joint fascination with the psychology of fairy-tales. They had distinct itineraries in the psychoanalytic movement, starting in Vienna and continuing in America. Both were assimilated Viennese Jewish intellectuals who graduated from the University of Vienna with their doctorates in 1937. Their social origins were divergent. Bettelheim came from a cultivated upper bourgeois background, whose father owned a lumber factory. Ekstein's class origins were petty bourgeois, his father was employed as a book-keeper.

Bettelheim's formal psychoanalytic education never actually began; it was interrupted by Anschluss (Austrian union with Germany) and by his arrest and incarceration in German concentration camps for eleven months in 1938-1939. He completed his analysis with Richard Sterba, a distinguished analyst affiliated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Ekstein's clinical psychoanalytic training came out of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society's