A Good Enough Genius

In the pantheon of our century’s genuine heroes, there surely will be a place for psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, the sage of childhood, who died this week at the age of 86. The fact that a healer who restored so many wounded children to hope took his own life after suffering a debilitating stroke doubtless will disturb some people. But such an act also can be seen as an affirmation of that courageous but austere autonomy Bettelheim learned to prize as a committed, though undogmatic, pupil of his great teacher Sigmund Freud.

Born in Vienna, Bettelheim studied with Freud and became a pioneer in the treatment of children’s emotional disturbances. In 1938, Bettelheim, a Jew, was arrested by the Nazis and spent nearly two years in Buchenwald and Dachau. Freed, partly through the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, he came to the United States, where he directed the University of Chicago’s treatment center for disturbed children. His work there as a therapist formed the basis for many of his books, including the influential “Love Is Not Enough.”

Bettelheim’s approach to the children he treated represented a conscious attempt to reverse the diabolical assault on prisoners’ personalities he had witnessed in the Nazi camps. “He told me that once you were in a camp, you could never escape the cruelty,” said Rudolph Ekstein, a Los Angeles psychoanalyst. “He turned it upside down when he started his school for disturbed children. It was a protected, caring environment, the mirror opposite of the camps. The door was locked to the outside, but always open from the inside.”

Perhaps best known for “The Uses of Enchantment,” his investigation of fairy tales’ powerful emotional hold on children, Bettelheim also was a wide-ranging cultural critic and scholar of psychoanalysis, being particularly concerned with recovering the spiritual and ethical nuances he felt had been lost during the translation of Freud’s work into English.

In 1987, Bettelheim published what he called “my testament,” a book he titled “A Good Enough Parent.” In it he argued that while children are “innately good,” none can be made “perfect,” and that any conscientious parent is “good enough.” It was a humane, consoling and guilt-dissolving conclusion to what his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb fittingly described as a “beautiful and useful life.”