A Reminiscence of My Friendship with Bruno Bettelheim

A few days before Bruno left Santa Monica to move to Silver Spring in Maryland, he gave me a copy of his latest book just published, entitled Freud's Vienna A. Other Essays and his final paragraphs in this book, perhaps the last published words of my friend, read now like a testament. He said:

Perhaps the time has come again when the Jews, because of their peculiar experience, have something of the greatest importance to teach. In many ways, the Western world itself seems to be embracing ghetto philosophy of not wishing to know, not wishing to understand what is going on in the rest of the world. If we are not careful, the white Western world, which is already a minority of mankind, will wail itself up in its own ghetto, by instruments of so-called deference. Within such a protective girdle-which is also a constrictive one-many contemplate digging into their shelters. Like the Jews who remained in their Eastern ghettos even after the Nazis arrived, we seem concerned only that business should go well in our big shtetl, and never mind what goes on in the rest of the world.

As we Jews succeed in freeing ourselves of whatever remnants of ghetto thinking we still harbor, it may fall to us to

This paper was published in an earlier form in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin (Fall, 1990).

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teach the Western world that it must, as we all must, enlarge the feeling of community beyond our own groups, beyond iron curtains-not because all the men are basically good, but because violence is as natural to man as the tendency toward order.

In spite of all, though I should have known during our last few months together, week by week, I did not realize mat I would never see him again. I wrote several times to his new address and then, postponing my own intention to call him, I received a telephone call telling me of his passing. It was March 13m and the first thing mat came to my mind was to remember that it was