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Roazen examines the role of Bruno Bettelheim in the history of psychoanalysis, emphasizing his famous study of Nazi concentration camps. Examining the reaction of other prisoners, such as their defense of identifying with the aggressor, Roazen reviews Bettelheim's famous discussion of self-defeating responses to aggression and how he upheld the ideal of the individual as an autonomous and self-reliant entity. Roazen writes about the importance of Bettelheim in his own education in such areas as autism, and the implications of the unconscious for social philosophy. He also assesses Bettelheim's contribution to psychohistory in reference to other great figures, such as Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Hannah Arendt. Roazen notes Bettleheim's movement—in such books as Symbolic Wounds, Dialogues with Mothers, and in his critique of the Ernest Jones biography of Freud—into original unorthodox positions. At first Roazen seems to have found Bettelheim's arguments persuasive, particularly as intellectual autobiography, and as an integration of what he had learned from the concentration camps and from Freud; yet he traces his own growing disillusionment with Bettelheim's egotistical obsession with autonomy. Finally, Roazen considers the implications of Bettelheim's suicide upon his work, as well as the troubling phenomenon of how many psychoanalysts have ended their lives by suicide.