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That I tried to remember a couple of years ago my early meeting with Bruno Bettelheim was in connection with the onset of open discussion, after his death in 1990, about his life's work and his person (see Sutton, 1996). The critics shocked the public with reports of occasionally violent and uncontrolled effects by Bettelheim on the “Orthogenic School”; according to these reports, the image that he depicts in his writings about himself, of his freedom from violence and superiority, and that which the readers according to their own wishes had made of him, was an illusion. How did I experience him? I was one of the few in Germany who had met him personally.
It was during the summer semester in 1955. I had just begun my studies and was participating in a seminar that Bettelheim was conducting as guest docent at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. For me, and that was certainly the case as well for others, he was at that time not a special name. As a beginning student, I had not heard anything about his revolutionary essay about his concentration camp experience (“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations”; Bettelheim, 1943) or about his collaboration in the research project “Studies in Prejudice” (Horkheimer & Flowerman, eds., 1949-1950). The seminar was announced as a course with the title “Group Psychology.”
The translation of this essay was provided by George Schmalzried, Brussels. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks for this exceptional commitment. My sincere thanks go also to David J. Fisher, Los Angeles, and Gerda Lederer, New York. They helped to resolve some especially difficult translation problems with their counsel.