Last Days of Bruno Bettelheim : Psychology: The brilliant and once-vigorous therapist, a former student of Freud’s work, left a void after his demise. Many still find his death--a suicide at 86--a little unsettling.
It is temptingly facile to try to make a seamless whole of a man’s work, his private life and his death.
So it is with Bruno Bettelheim, the trailblazing child psychotherapist and behavioral essayist whose suicide on March 13 came little more than a month after he moved from a Santa Monica condominium to a Maryland retirement home.
He was, by all accounts, frustrated over his physical limitations--frayed by two strokes, by ailments from pancreatitis to heart problems--and still sorrowing over his wife’s death in 1984, and over what some acquaintances believe was enduring family friction as well.
“What I know,” said Fritz Redlich, emeritus chairman of Yale Medical School’s psychiatry department, “is actually only two things about which he talked to me: the death of his wife, and he felt afterwards very lonely, in spite of friends, in spite of family, that I know definitely. And the other was, he was ill.”
The man who had borne the confidences of so many was not inclined to reveal much of his own. And yet to Marilyn Snell, managing editor of the journal New Perspectives Quarterly in West Los Angeles, whom he had never met, he spoke frankly.
Snell had called him in Maryland to ask for his response to an article on his parenting theories.: “He said yes, I’ve seen your issue, I’ve read it, I just can’t help you. His exact words were, ‘They’ve left me here and I’m so lonely and confused’ “--to “me, a total stranger. I could imagine him, this man who has helped so many people, all alone in this rest home.”
When she got off the phone after about four minutes, Snell said she “burst into tears.”
Even before he moved to Maryland, said Redlich, Bettelheim “got increasingly unhappy about the way he lived alone here for a while. Then the last sort of messages I got from (the East Coast)--not directly, only indirectly--were that he felt very unhappy there.”
Bettelheim’s children--Ruth, a Santa Monica therapist, Bruno, his son in London--did not return phone calls to The Times. A second daughter living back East, near the retirement home Bettelheim last occupied, could not be reached.
He came to Santa Monica from Northern California in about 1986, apparently not long before the first of his strokes. For nearly two years he lived with his daughter and her children, friends say, in a Santa Monica house that records indicate was bought in 1986 and owned by the Bruno Bettelheim Trust.
It is a capacious, two-story place, and Bettelheim’s office was in the dining room. The bookshelves along its walls attested to the range of his mind; the brass handrails installed in his bathroom to help him move about spoke to the limitations of his body.
But in the spring of 1988, the Santa Monica house was sold for a recorded $1.225 million price. The household broke up; his daughter and her children moved to another Santa Monica house. Bettelheim moved into a fifth-floor rented condominium with a narrow view of the ocean and a live-in housekeeper. In the bedroom, hung a portrait in oils of his wife; thus, said an acquaintance, she “looked at him every night and he looked at her.”
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, chief of psychiatry at Olive View Medical Center, recently observed that Bettelheim “had already tried living with his daughter, and that I guess was too much for the daughter.” Greenblatt, Bettelheim and Redlich were members of a select UCLA luncheon group composed of about a dozen emeritus academics who met weekly for informal conversation.
Other acquaintances say Bettelheim was lonely, and they made unspecific references to an estrangement from his daughter that weighed much on him.
Before Bettelheim moved East, his close friend and countryman Rudolf Ekstein, also a psychotherapist, reassured him that “whenever Ruth needs anything, I am here. He said thank you.”
Friends could reel off a thesaurus’ worth of adjectives about Bettelheim: provocative, opinionated, charismatic. “Extraordinarily charming but I’d never call him lovable,” said Dr. Jacqui Sanders, a colleague of nearly 40 years standing, and Bettelheim’s successor as head of the Orthogenic School for disturbed children at the University of Chicago. The man who spent an hour on the phone soothing a frantic mother could turn right around and criticize veterans’ wives for how they struggled to raise their children alone, she said. “He thought in both instances that what he was doing was best for the people.”
Sanders is impatient with the post-mortem speculation, the efforts to square the circle of Bettelheim.
It is “not so difficult to understand that two people in a family can be estranged, even the best (family),” particularly after the “very stressful” death of his wife, and his failing health, Sanders said. “People expect someone who has great brilliance, great charisma, you expect them to be perfect. In terms of how he died, I think if he weren’t such a great man nobody would have given it a second thought.”
Dr. Edwin Shneidman, suicidologist and emeritus professor of thanatology at UCLA, resorted to analogy to argue the ultimate irrelevance of such matters to the merit of Bettelheim’s work: “I don’t want to know about FDR and Lucy Rutherford . . . I don’t care that Rembrandt burped.”
Bruno Bettelheim had survived two concentration camps, Dachau and Buchenwald.
On March 13, 1938, 52 years to the day before he died, Nazis had marched into his Austrian homeland, commencing a saga that moved Bettelheim from death camps to a Chicago university to a Santa Monica condominium, from being a student of Freud’s work to achieving his own renown.
Bettelheim was a bold and vigorous man in his 50s when he recounted this incident:
Outside a Nazi gas chamber, a group of women were lined up awaiting their turn. The commanding SS officer heard that one woman had been a dancer and ordered her to dance for him. As she did, she moved close enough to seize his gun, and shot him down. Of course she, too, was shot to death.
But is it not possible, Bettelheim proposed, that what the dancer did also left her “transformed, however momentarily”?
“Even if she had to die in the process,” by “exercising the last freedom that not even the concentration camp could take away . . . this dancer threw off her real prison. This she could do because she was willing to risk her life to achieve autonomy once more. If we do that, then if we cannot live, at least we die as men.”
Bruno Bettelheim was an enfeebled and fragile man of 86 when he died by his own hand. And like the dancer of whom he wrote, perhaps by his death “achieved autonomy once more.”
Bettelheim was found dead in the hallway of his apartment in the Maryland retirement home. He was shirtless, a plastic bag secured over his head. He had had “about a good shot and a half” of whiskey, said the medical examiner. “He left notes; it was self-evident.”
His close friend, Dr. Ekstein, learned by telephone that Bettelheim was dead. “I looked at the calendar. On the day he died, the Nazis invaded. Did his head know? Certainly I knew. Did he think about that?” In March 1938, “it was over, but it wasn’t over, (because of) the obstacles we overcame.” In March 1990, “no more.”
There had been hints of his frustration at his waning strength. There had been talk of the Hemlock Society, Ekstein said.
When Bettelheim gave Ekstein a copy of “Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays”--autographed in a shaky hand in German, “To my good friend Rudy, from the heart”--Ekstein teased him again with their running joke. “We had a kind of competition. I’d bring a book and say ‘Bruno, I’m only three books behind,’ and he’d say ‘No, I have one coming (out) in two weeks, I’m still four ahead.’ ” This time, Bettelheim said, “This is my last book.”
Ekstein was troubled that his friend would uproot himself to move 3,000 miles, to a place “so isolated--I wanted him to be in the community here, like me,” he said. He offered Bettelheim his home. “I said he can come stay here with me. I couldn’t convince him.”
About two months before he died, Bettelheim sat down with Ekstein, reminiscing on videotape for Dr. Scott May, a child psychiatrist on UCLA’s clinical faculty. Between the two men lay more than a century’s work in psychoanalysis, and in more than an hour’s thoughtful conversation they roamed freely through theory and technique, Freud and fin de siecle Vienna.
In Freud’s Imperial Vienna--where Bettelheim and Ekstein were born--”death was an omnipresent idea . . . “ Americans, however, are “a much more vital culture, much more interested in life . . . “ In so doing, though, Americans deny the “dynamic syspost’ of opposite forces--”the libido, the life drive, the sex drive,” and “the death tendency.” Death, said Bettelheim, “is something that is denied in the American culture. People don’t die, they ‘pass on’ or they ‘depart,’ but they don’t die. Life without death loses a lot of its meaning. It’s death in many ways that gives life its deepest meaning, and that I think is missing.”
At the end of the tape, Bettelheim spoke to the need for man to come to terms with his “destructive tendencies,” so that “in the eternal battle between the two eternal forces” of Eros and Thanatos, love and death, “Eros will win out at least for the time being, although Thanatos in the end always wins out . . . “
(Portions of the Jan. 10 tape, and a eulogy by Ekstein, will be part of a private memorial service honoring Bettelheim’s life and work on Friday evening at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute.)
All his life, in a dozen-plus books and scores of scholarly articles, in every lecture he gave, Bettelheim railed against passivity and indignities that corrode character, arguing for order even in the most chaotic of universes--inside the heads of the psychotic, the autistic, inside concentration camps.
Sanders in Chicago spoke to him the day before his death. “He was a man of great dignity, very strong. His disabilities were very, very difficult for him, and his view of the kind of person he was. . . . He has not seemed his old self for the past couple of years.”
Nonetheless, Bettelheim kept working: his latest book was dedicated to his wife, Gertrud. Another book, a collaborative effort, was almost finished. It was not enough. “How many 86-year-olds publish books? But to him it was like (he was) doing nothing,” said Sanders.
Theron Raines was his book agent for 20 years, and visited him in Maryland in early March. “In my opinion there was no diminution at all” in his mind, Raines said. “His body was failing him but his mind was all there, and I said so to him. He had had two strokes and congestive heart failure and was extremely frail, so it was a sound mind in a very unsound body, and I don’t think he liked it. . . . “
When Ekstein and Bettelheim were alone together, they spoke German, dropping sometimes into slangy Austrian idioms of their young manhood. But it was an American term that Ekstein chose to describe his friend’s suicide: “It was a lousy death.”
Yet Shneidman found himself reflecting that “Bruno had a keen sense of inviolacy (and) autonomy,” and his death was consonant with that. Although the point of psychotherapy is to enhance a patient’s comfort, he said, “there’s more to life than comfort. There’s also the place of dignity and the presence of vigor. And Bruno was a man who could not live with declining vigor and certainly did not want to live in the absence of dignity.”
Although he remains “puzzled” by his death, Redlich said he can respect that once the decision was made, “he died with tremendous determination . . . he died as he lived, with colossal commitment.”
