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On March 13, 1990, at the age of 86, Bruno Bettelheim took some pills, pulled a plastic bag over his head, and died by suicidal asphyxiation. One must wonder if the publication, weeks earlier, of his last book, Freud's Vienna & Other Essays, foreshadowed his decision that he was through with living. Bettelheim agreed with Freud that autobiographies, like biographies, bind the author “to lying, to concealment, and to flummery,” and thus, he offered this collection of essays as a substitute. To the extent that certain themes reappear in this literary mosaic, the reader will come away knowing a little more about Bruno Bettelheim, psychoanalyst, child psychologist, and humanist.
The essays are organized into three sections. “Part I. On Freud and Psychoanalysis,” provides insight into the birth and development of psychoanalysis. Bettelheim maintains in his first essay, “Freud's Vienna,” that it was no accident that psychoanalysis originated in Vienna, where a strange combination of thanatos and eros pervaded the city, furnishing fertile soil for psychoanalysis to take root and grow. Although a fascinating argument, I find more compelling his proposition that it was in this environment of desperation, a feeling of being unable to change the external world, that Freud turned inward to the hidden aspects of the self.
Bettelheim adds a new dimension to the Freud-Jung schism in his essay entitled “A Secret Asymmetry.” Although there is nothing novel in his view that the rift was the result of an oedipal situation, he also suggests that the break was destined from the beginning. Jung turned to Freud for help in his relationship with a patient, Sabina Spielrein (who later became an analyst), but he could not face its sexual component nor admit this to Freud. Ultimately, argues Bettelheim, his inability to confront this individual issue was transformed into a refusal to accept the central role of sexuality.
In “How I Learned About Psychoanalysis,” Bettelheim divulges that he, like