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Twenty years have passed since the death of Bruno Bettelheim—who committed suicide at the age of eighty-six in Silver Spring, Maryland—and, contrary to what one might imagine, there have been only three previous major biographies of this controversial figure in American psychoanalysis1
David James Fisher—a scholar and staunch defender of Bettelheim who was also his friend—pens his collection of essays with words to this effect. Himself a psychoanalyst, Fisher has previously published a biography of Romain Rolland2 and another psychoanalytic text.3
Bettelheim: Living and Dying is organized into five sections and twelve chapters. It begins with biographical information and an assessment of Bettelheim's overall impact on culture, education, and psychotherapy. Born in Vienna in 1903, Bettelheim published seventeen books over the course of his lifetime, as well as a large number of scientific and popular articles, prefaces, and book reviews. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of psychology and demonstrated an impressive ability to write cogently about a broad spectrum of topics. He is perhaps best known for an international bestseller on child rearing.4
Bettelheim came into contact with psychoanalysis in Vienna during the 1920s and ′30s. He was in analysis for eleven months with Richard Sterba, but this analysis (a personal one, not a training analysis) was interrupted by the rise of Nazism. Bettelheim made an interesting comment on his analysis with respect to the analytic training of the time: “During the therapeutic analysis, one was not supposed to read psychoanalytic writings. One might have read them before. In the didactic analysis, one was encouraged to r