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This collection of essays is presented by Bruno Bettelheim in lieu of an autobiography and, so Bettelheim tells us, to provide readers
with an understanding of the major influences on his life. The most important influence, he tells us in his Introduction, was his wife, but the details of their relationship, Bettelheim says, “best remain private” (p. ix). Quoting Freud to the effect that biographers are given “to lying, to concealment, to flummery” (p. ix), Bettelheim confesses that Freud's unflattering assessment of biographers would apply even more to Bettelheim himself were he to attempt to write his autobiography. But whereas Freud's remark was meant to express, among other things, his low opinion of biographies, and the lies and concealments referred to were meant to be understood as willful, Bettelheim appears to have assumed Freud was speaking of the inevitable distortions that unconsciously occur in recalling life events. How else to explain his remark that he knows the truth of Freud's assertion, because “when I made efforts to recollect major events in my life, I became aware of my tendency to over-stress the importance of some events and conveniently to forget others…” (p. ix). This remark of Bettelheim's is puzzling. If he was able to become aware of his distortions and upon reflection correct them, what's the problem? He would, of course, still be left with events filtered through his own personality, but that is the case with every autobiography. And that is exactly what we have here anyway in this collection of essays, many overtly autobiographical and many written decades after the events they describe. Why should these essays be immune to the lies, concealment, and flummery Bettelheim is so concerned with?
Perhaps Bettelheim's somewhat tortured preoccupation with concealment at the outset of what is intended to be a substitute for the autobiography he feels incapable of writing reflect in some way his need to identify with his hero Freud, who was c