You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Scientists, artists, and all men who make intelligence a way of life seem seized by an immediate responsibility to confront with their understanding those challenging social and political crises which mark our age as violent and erratic. Dr. Bettelheim's book is a vivid picture of the scientist thus engaged. He has written a tract, a call to vigilance against the unique danger of modern mass society, an irreversible dissolution of individuality. At every turn he tries to arm vigilance with a program, with specific means for action. In the end, however, he can indicate only the general direction of individual development implicit in his warning. His psychoanalytic training enables him to make acute observations on the influences of technological society and the mass state on the individual. His example is his own hard experience. Therefore he can make clear what is so often inaccessible,—the deeper psychoanalytic connections of moral feeling and action.
The Informed Heart is a moral autobiography. Dr. Bettelheim has always been an educator, trying to help the child and man achieve freedom of intention and of action, to maximize inner controls and minimize those outer controls implemented by social forces. Individual identity, upon which depend self-respect and self-realization, is thus developed. Dr. Bettelheim chose psychoanalysis as the instrument by which to achieve these aims. Analysis, he believes, failed him because it was developed in a vanished way of life which took for granted the external world and it ignores 'reality' in favor of the unconscious. This conclusion was forced upon him after he was thrown into an 'extreme situation': imprisonment at Dachau and Buchenwald. Concentration camps and later emigration crystallized the purposes of his life: to develop the personality through social and educational influences so that man can stand up to any environment, or change it and himself as radically and suddenly as necessary. Adaptation to an '