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Bettelheim's standing used to be more securely established among the general reading public than with professional analysts. He succeeded in writing a series of interesting and provocative books that attracted
worldwide interest. Since his self-inflicted death as an old man in 1990, however, his reputation has gone into an abrupt eclipse. Harsh publicity about his reliance on physical and psychological abuse at his orthogenie school at the University of Chicago has been followed by close biographical scrutiny that sometimes has been so severe as to leave his previous public renown in tatters.
The merit of Paul Marcus's book is that he concentrates on examining both the pros and cons of Bettelheim's famous argument on the Nazi concentration camps and what that has to tell us about life in mass societies. Bettelheim was also enlarging traditional psychoanalytic theory, which has always been inadequate when it comes to acknowledging the full social role of forces outside strictly individual development. For example, I cannot think of psychoanalysts, including Freud, who have paid attention to the role of nannies and housekeepers in the raising of children, yet I would hazard the guess that more children in human history have been raised by people other than biological parents than one might ever guess from examining the professional literature. More generally, an issue that still remains controversial among psychoanalysts is how to deal with society as well as psychology. Starting with Alfred Adler's socialism, any attention to social realities frequently has been dismissed as “mere” sociology, which became a standard way of handling other so-called apostates, such as Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. Bettelheim's tack was to start off with his own experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis, to deal with what it could tell us about the struggle to maintain individuality under traumatic twentieth century conditions, and to connect that with his recommendations about how to tre