Bruno Bettelheim: Culture in Man, Man in Culture, and a Language for Both

For Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst and ego psychologist, the social and personal were deeply imbricated. When he wrote about the sense of one's community — kibbutz, residential school, neighborhood, country — he was writing about psychoanalysis. When he wrote about womb envy, the obsolescence of adolescence, the jeopardy of the middle class, he wrote as a psychoanalyst, a student of die Seek, the soul. He believed that our language reflected our thinking and was profoundly embedded in our culture. Hence, translation was a treacherous enterprise: a word carries the mycelia of one's culture, background, religion, and myths. Therefore, to write about Bettelheim and cultural issues is to write about a specific constellation of psychoanalysis that was more evident in Vienna when psychoanalysts were profoundly pursuing not only their clinical work in consulting rooms, but also its application to street delinquents (Aichhorn, 1935), Fascism (Reich, 1946), or social systems (Fromm, 1941).

I start with an infrequently cited (and possibly rarely read) work by Bettelheim and Janowitz, Social Change and Prejudice . This is timely. In psychoanalysis, in our literature, we have been increasingly concerned with the nature, dynamics, and control of aggression, much as we once were with the repression of sexuality/sensuality. Prejudice is the precursor of acted-out aggression; it is the readiness to depersonalize individuals and treat them disdainfully,