Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy

The first biography of one of the most glorified and villified figures of our time: Bruno Bettelheim, the brilliant discoverer of a unique method of treating disturbed children. "Admirable on all points."--Roland Jaccard, Le Monde.

Bruno Bettelheim was a legendary psychotherapist; a revered author of influential clinical studies on the lives of autistic children as well as popular Freudian interpretations of myth and fairy tale; and founder of the Orthogenic School of psychoanalysis in Chicago. Nina Sutton, an admirer of his work, found herself stunned by the "Bettelheim Affair"--the scandal that erupted after he killed himself in 1990, at the age of 86, when his reputation as a benevolent sage was besmirched by former patients who claimed that he had sadistically beaten them. Beginning her biography with an account of that scandal, Sutton proceeds to analyze the legacy of the man's work, relating it to his difficult life, and goes some way toward reclaiming Bettelheim's damaged reputation.