The Man in the White Coat

When the famed psychologist and writer Bruno Bettelheim was found dead on the floor of his new apartment in a Maryland nursing home on March 13, 1990, a plastic bag over his head and barbiturates in his bloodstream, the psychological community reeled.

“Bettelheim would often use what he called ‘The Man in the White Coat Theory,’ ” commented a distressed colleague. “He said that in addition to honesty, there has to be a quality of ‘The Man in the White Coat’ in your professional presentation, the image of the magical ability to heal. Well, certainly, ‘The Man in the White Coat’ doesn’t kill himself.”

At the time of his death at 86, Bettelheim was considered that rarest of creatures: a populist intellectual. He had published 18 books, including the National Book Award winner “The Uses of Enchantment,” and written scores of magazine articles. In addition, for more than 25 years, he had run the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School and, in so doing, pioneered a new type of enlightened and humane residential therapy to treat emotionally disturbed children, most of whom had previously been little more than warehoused.

Bettelheim had the intellectual heft to argue that Freud’s central concepts had been grossly mistranslated (most notably in “Freud and Man’s Soul”) while writing a monthly column on parenting for Ladies’ Home Journal. A survivor of two Nazi concentration camps (Dachau and Buchenwald), he became a noted theorist on Holocaust issues, and his published ideas about women presaged Betty Friedan’s. By 1983, Bettelheim was so recognizable a figure that he played himself in Woody Allen’s film “Zelig.”

Yet, within a few months of his suicide, Bettelheim’s white coat was in tatters and his previously stellar reputation was plummeting at neck-snapping speed as former students from the Orthogenic School came forward with accusations that the saintly Dr. B was in reality an autocratic tyrant who hit and otherwise terrified patients and staff.

These unpleasant revelations were followed by news that, when Bettelheim arrived in the United States after his release from the camps, he fabricated much of his curriculum vitae. There were also grim mentions in academic journals suggesting that he’d cribbed certain ideas in his much lauded “The Uses of Enchantment.” A thinly disguised Bettelheim was even featured as a fictional archvillain by psychologist-turned-crime writer Jonathan Kellerman in his 1994 whodunit, “Bad Love.”

“Hero or Humbug?” shouted the headline of a Bettelheim-related article in a 1997 issue of Time magazine. That same year, two major biographies of Bettelheim appeared in stores, each strenuously researched, each purporting to set the record straight. The first, “Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy” by Anglo-French journalist Nina Sutton, was essentially approving; the second, “The Creation of Dr. B,” by former Nation editor Richard Pollak (whose brother had attended the Orthogenic School), was an excoriating j’accuse. Now there is a third book, “Rising to the Light: A Portrait of Bruno Bettelheim,” by his longtime agent and friend Theron Raines.

I approached the Raines book with some trepidation because I had interviewed Bettelheim on three occasions before his death, at which times he talked extensively, even obsessively, about whether he intended to kill himself. Because of the unusual nature of our conversations, I was contacted by his three would-be biographers, and they all tipped their hands about the slants they intended to take.

At the time, Raines sounded the most muddled. He admitted he was close to Bettelheim and felt for the man a deep, almost reverent, affection, thus was unwilling to give succor to his critics. Yet, he also understood that an admiring apologia for a man whose reputation was so grime-spattered as Bettelheim’s would not be viewed charitably by readers or reviewers. After a decade-long wrestling match with his material, Raines settled on a third route. The result is likely to be categorized as yet another Bettelheim biography. But it isn’t.

While Sutton and Pollak aimed to assess Bettelheim’s life and work (albeit from radically opposed positions), Raines attempts to give a picture of what it was like to be Bettelheim. The project was conceived in 1983 as a long magazine article written largely in Bettelheim’s own voice, with Raines acting as a sort of midwife. (Evidently, despite Raines’ pleading, Bettelheim had for years declined to write an autobiography.) To give the piece some balance, Raines began talking to friends and colleagues; soon the material overflowed its bounds and Raines realized he was writing a book, not an article.

But what kind of book? After Bettelheim’s suicide and the ensuing scandals, a simple presentation of the Great Man’s words was no longer tenable. In the end, Raines circled around to a far more rigorous version of the project than he originally envisioned. “I have not set out to answer Bettelheim’s army of critics ...,” he writes, “nor do I expect to decrease their number.”

Instead, Raines paints a subjective but convincing portrait of the man he knew for 20 years and got to know better posthumously through his dogged pursuit of Bettelheim’s methods and motives. Raines’ Bettelheim is a passionate, brilliant yet complicated creature, permanently wounded by various events in his life, whose capacious and original mind allowed him to use his wounds--and the wounds he perceived in others--as launching pads for deeper consideration of the meaning and purpose behind human behavior.

When it comes to areas of contention, rather than argue with Pollak and his fellow detractors, Raines simply burrows more deeply into Bettelheim’s version of events, ostensibly in search of a fuller truth. As it turns out, this is a surprisingly interesting strategy. Though one may or may not always agree with Bettelheim’s choices, one often comes away comprehending the meticulous logic that led him to make them.

Of course, the most difficult issues to penetrate have to do with Bettelheim’s actions at the Orthogenic School. Yet even here Raines provokes thought and insight. He also places Bettelheim’s theories within the context of the beliefs prevalent during the years he began his work at the school: The rest of the nation’s psychiatric experts thought it best to shock or tranquilize disturbed children, while Bettelheim believed in a residential environment that was universally nurturing and encouraging.

Bettelheim also believed that an autocratic parental figure (separate from the all-accepting counselors) was needed to provide an appropriate “superego” structure until the child could develop one of his or her own. That harsh father was Bettelheim. “I was always called in when things got out of hand,” he told Raines, “to settle the issue. This is part of the father role, you know. I think in a way they were afraid of me, and it served a useful purpose. Why? Because it kept their disintegrating tendencies in balance ....”

Only in the case of what Raines calls “the plagiarism slander” does he take a run at Bettelheim’s critics head-on. In doing so, he manages to convincingly demonstrate that the short, non-seminal passages--lifted without attribution from writer and psychiatrist Julius Heuscher--add up to, at worst, some brief moments in sloppy scholarship. (Raines further suggests that the condemnatory cries from various mainstream media were the result of much sloppier source checking.) To hammer home his point, Raines tracks down Heuscher, the allegedly wronged party, who waves away the plagiarism notion. “I think it’s ridiculous to make a thing about this,” says Heuscher.

In the natural course of his narrative, Raines touches on some of the controversies that Bettelheim seemed to attract--despite his popularity--throughout much of his career. In many of these cases, the arguments seemed to be less with Bettelheim than with misinterpretations of his ideas by book reviewers and academics. For example, after the 1954 publication of “Symbolic Wounds,” he was repeatedly criticized for comparing children and psychotics to preliterate tribes, whereas Raines uses Bettelheim’s own text to show that the author pointed instead to a common humanity. “Far from wishing to draw parallels between primitive man and schizophrenic youngsters,” Bettelheim wrote, “I tried to show how parallel are the primitive wishes of all men. [For example] ... I believe puberty rites to refer to something so primitive that we all share in it.” (These same ideas were enthusiastically embraced a few years later by such popular authors as Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly.)

By elucidating Bettelheim’s insights on a variety of topics, Raines reminds us that behind whatever clouds of scandal there may be lies a profound body of work, much of which still has the power to touch and inform us today, if we will only take the time to examine it more closely.

When I finished Raines’ book, on a whim I fished out the old transcripts from my conversations with Bettelheim. Glancing through the pages I was able to hear in my mind’s ear his heavily accented voice, so full of intelligence, humor, eloquence, sadness. I remembered how much I’d liked him. Then my gaze landed on something he said on the last day we talked. I’d just asked him if there was anything he felt he’d left undone.

I recall he smiled at the question. “I guess many things. There’s so much to know. And so little time, really. My goal was to say what I wanted to say as well as I could. And make it relatively easy to understand. I tried to write clearly. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I tried.”

Interesting, I thought. At the end of his life, Bettelheim didn’t wish for recognition. Or agreement. Or even success in his role as a healer. Only the goal of clarity and understanding. This is also Raines’ goal: clarity and understanding. For Bettelheim. And, perhaps, for all of us.