Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp

Bruno Bettelheim has now made it to the United States, where he executes his elaborate plan to fix "emotionally disturbed" children by making a nice concentration camp. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people and problematic people. And we've got both this week with the story of Bruno Bettelheim, a man who is really, really testing my previous conclusion that like, there's no, there's no wrong way to react to having been in a concentration camp. Maybe this way. Bruno might have, might have been the guy to figure out the wrong way.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  How to lose all sympathy.

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. My guest with me again, as in part one, Alison Raskin. Alison, how are you doing? It's the same day, but we pretend it's a separate one.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I'm good. What I didn't reveal in episode one, which I feel like will be more relevant for this part of what of his life story is that I actually have had OCD since I was four years old. So I was someone who was treated for pretty severe mental illness as a young child and was put on Prozac when I was four and was actually incredibly thankful for my parents being proactive in that way and getting me the help that I needed. So I'm like not that it is at all against taking children's mental health seriously. And it's like a kind of a lot of the activism I do. But I think we're about to explore a scenario where that goes wrong.

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  Horribly, horribly wrong.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  Well, it's also, you know, it's, it's interesting because a big part of Bruno's story and a big part of like where people go wrong. Cause like, as you said, it's good to be involved and care about your children's mental health and the mental health of children in general. Bruno, as a young man, takes this kid in who is like neurodivergent and her mom just like, "I don't want to raise a kid," right? "Find someone else to do it for me." And Bruno's whole business as an adult is not just, "I'm helping kids who are having problems," it's, "I am taking these kids away from their rich parents who do not want to deal with them and handling them," you know? Which is very different from the healthy version of this, where you're just... Because I have a lot of empathy even in this time, right?

• 2:18Robert Evans?

  Where we talk about like, he's diagnosing kids as things that we would not today because they just don't... I'm not judgmental of someone who legitimately is trying to help kids and it's just like, "We called things by different names then, we didn't know as much as we know now." It's one thing to make errors, it's another thing to have your whole goal be, "What if a concentration camp but nice for children?" Which is again, part of the motivating factor here.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And also, like, we're still getting stuff wrong now.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, absolutely. Tons of them.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  But it's still a flawed system.

• 2:53Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  And there's also a lot of debate about the merits of diagnosing at all.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I'm someone that has found comfort and, and sort of clarity in being diagnosed and having my diagnosis pretty much my whole life, but a lot of people don't feel that way. And so, it's an interesting debate.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  And they feel totally, totally different about it than in the 40s. Like, one thing they do constantly is diagnose kids as psychotic, right? Which you cannot today, that is not something that happens. Because like, you, the idea that like, you would diagnose a child as being a psychopath, right? Is very normal then, right?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Well, now they'll do oppositional defiant disorder.

• 3:37Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Which is, which is like, a pathway or whatever towards that eventual diagnosis. But there are certain restraints around what age you can call people, what age you can give them certain things.

• 3:51Robert Evans?

  And that just like, it's the Wild West in Bruno's era.

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• 4:02Robert Evans?

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• 5:05Robert Evans?

  Now, Bruno has, at the time we've, you know, we're starting up here, he has just gotten over to the US. He has escaped the Holocaust and he has gotten a job. He started out as an academic. He had, you know, lost his family business at this point. He has no money, but this lady who, you know, he had helped raise her daughter is kind of taking care of them, right? And the understanding is that they need to figure out something, but like, they're not immediate, they're not like on the streets or whatever, right? And Bruno very quickly is able to get work for himself, although there's also some problematic aspects because his initial gig, he gets hired to be an English teacher in Portland, Oregon, and then World War II starts, and suddenly the idea of having an Austrian man

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  teaching English is like, we're not really bullish on the Austrians right now. Even though you were a victim of the Nazis, we don't actually have a teaching position for you.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  It just feeds his, like, the persecution and the, everything that's happened to him until then.

• 6:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, although it's also, there's a degree to which this works out well for Bruno, because he doesn't really want to be an English teacher, and he doesn't want to be in Oregon. He is, he falls in love with the idea of the city of Chicago, in part because it has a more European layout, so he finds it kind of more similar to where he'd come up. He is very interested in child development and educational reform. These are like academic interests. He's not a professional in these yet, but this is what he wants for himself. So he kind of works as an academic for a few years until in 1944, he receives his US citizenship. That same year, he gets the job that will be responsible for most of his fame and for most of the problematic things he's going to do in his life, which

• 6:51Robert Evans?

  is directing the orthogenic school. Now, I know what you're saying. Robert, orthogenic school sounds dystopian as fuck. That is a scary name for a school.

• 7:04Robert Evans?

  And it is a scary name. The word orthogenic comes from Greek, and it literally means straightening out. So the school for straightening out kids, that's a scary thing to call a school. It had been established in 1915, and it was a residential facility where kids were interned until their behavior was deemed to be fixed, right? Like, that's the, like, where it is. So this is a, when you talk about a residential facility, some of them have elements, and this is certainly the case at the time, of like a prison, right? Now, this is not one of those. This is for kids with resources, right? These are for kids with, whose parents have money. So this is not like the, this is not like the worst versions of these facilities, right?

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  And in fact, from the beginning, this is kind of viewed as a response to those facilities, which are a lot uglier. It was a unique place geared not just for emotionally disturbed kids, but for, and these are the terms they use at the time, but specifically for emotionally disturbed children of, quote, "above average intelligence," right? Now, this means rich white kids, right?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 8:10Robert Evans?

  Yes. That, when we say above average intellect, right? These are kids whose parents have money, and thus, we're, our goal is to make sure they have a future, right?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  It would be fun to go through history and find all the different euphemisms for rich white kids.

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  And it's in when the school is founded 1915, they do, they use these, they don't say, this is a school for rich white kids. They say like, this is emotionally disturbed, but above average intelligence kids, right? As soon as Bruno takes over, he's like, no, no, no, let's just say it's a school for rich white kids. That's what we're doing, right? That's what we want to do here, you know? And as soon as he takes over, his first job as director is to turn this into policy. Prior to him taking the director job, the school had not had a whites only policy on paper. Bruno institutes one. He's like, look, let's call a, we're racist as fuck, we're racist as fuck. It's just say it's white. And again, this school in 1915 isn't willing to say that. In 44, Bruno's like, oh, obviously we're whites only.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  You go right from a concentration camp to like a whites only, instituting a whites only policy. I mean, it feels so like directly a, I need to align myself with the people in power. Like I can no longer be viewed as other. And so it's like this, right? Because I mean, some people at that time probably didn't, definitely didn't view Jews as white. Like then it would be like, you're not allowed to be at this school.

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  Especially not at this time. No.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And it's his way of, of like, making sure that he's in with the, with the people in power.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  And he is, he has, he does a lot of writing about his attitudes that like, he doesn't like Christianity either, because he's not a religious guy, but he thinks it's better than Judaism. And so the school will be specifically a Christian school, even when it sort of is educating kids who don't come from Christian families. He like tries to acculturate them. The only holiday they celebrate at the school is Christmas. So his attitude is very much, even when the students are, you know, not from, from a Christian background, I want to acculturate them as white Christians, right? And that is-

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Me, a Jewish man, would love to do that.

• 10:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I know exactly how to celebrate Christmas. Now Bruno justifies his whites only policy by arguing that racialized children, that means non-white kids, would confuse the white kids and harm their recovery. The term racialized to describe kids that just aren't white? No, these kids, they can't handle the shock of seeing someone who isn't white. That'll fuck up their recovery.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That person doesn't look exactly like me. I have to commit a crime.

• 10:52Robert Evans?

  I can't handle it. I can't handle it. I'm gonna go rob a bank.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  Now Bruno also wrote that he was only interested in white students from quote "good high-class stock." That meant kids whose families could afford to send them to college. He instituted a tuition of $8,000 to $12,000 a year to ensure that no poor children were educated at the orthogenic school. If you're curious-

• 11:15Speaker 01

  That's in the 40s?

• 11:16Robert Evans?

  That's in the 40s.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  That is, this is like, really, really, like, high-grade university education is what this costs per year. And the expectation is that you will put them in there at least for two years, and many of them for like, something like 10 to 12, right? He really wants you to give your kid to him for that kid's entire childhood. Otherwise, he can't fix them, right? That's his motivation.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But then if you do, they come out great.

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  But then, then they come out perfect.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  But if they see a person with different color of skin, they will start screaming.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

  No, you gotta let me have them until they're like 20, you know, make sure they don't see anybody else.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  They can't see anyone else, or they will lose it.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's like 40 to 60 kids at this institution at any given time. Now, Bruno also has another issue with the school. As soon as he takes over, you know, first job, make it expensive as shit, only white kids. Second job, he has a real issue with the fact that the orthogenic school, you know, the motto is "a place to grow straight and tall," allows disabled kids to be educated there. And he doesn't like that, because somebody with a physical disability can never grow straight and tall, in Bruno's eyes, right? So again, what are the first things the Nazis do is go after people with specifically children with disabilities. This is how they test the, like, the gas

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  chambers, right? Like, which are initially like mobile execution vans for disabled people. What is one of the first things Bruno does when he starts this school? No more, get those disabled kids out of here. None of them.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I mean, he's really telling on himself, right? That he wrote that paper that people's reaction to being in a concentration camp is to become a Nazi.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  That was kind of your reaction, huh, Bruno?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  He was just like, "No, I've just become a Nazi, and therefore, everyone else must have as well."

• 13:05Robert Evans?

  Okay. Um, in an article for Disability Studies Quarterly, Griffin Epstein writes, "Whereas prior to his tenure, the school offered a residential program for children with epilepsy and cerebral palsy, Bettelheim was certain that public institutions could handle such cases. This was a bold claim, given that public schools weren't mainstreamed in the United States until the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. In the 40s thus, those public institutions handling children with epilepsy and CP were abusive state institutions, group homes and hospitals." So he just kind of lies and says, "Ah, the schools can handle them." And the schools are like, "Oh, no, we just lock those kids up. We don't know what to do with them," you know?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Well, in his opinion, that's handling them, right?

• 13:47Robert Evans?

  That's handling them, right? Because it can't be fixed, you know, in his attitude, right? Bruno's second act as director of the orthogenic school was to recruit a new population of students, and he focuses mostly on children with autism and others who he calls, quote, "young victims of extreme psychosis." And the reason he picks these kids, and again, we would not diagnose them the same way today, but these are all kids that he sees as not having visible physical disabilities, right? That is the key point, right? That's what he means by autism, right? Is something is not neurotypical about this kid, but they are not, in my eyes, physically disabled. That is what he means by this, right?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  They're not, like, developmentally delayed in a physical way.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. That's certainly how he sees it, to continue with that article. "In constructing a dialectical opposition between epilepsy, cerebral palsy and autism, Bettelheim helped to tacitly promote a eugenic logic of unreformable versus reformable bodies." You know? And, yes, that is some very, very Nazi-adjacent shit.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  The whole time he was in that camp, he was like, "These are good ideas."

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  These are good. If it wasn't the Nazis doing them, I wouldn't have it, like...

• 15:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  That's what he's taking a lot of notes on.

• 15:02Robert Evans?

  He's taking some wild things from his experience.

• 15:08Robert Evans?

  The medical logic behind all of this is also rooted in Bruno's writing about concentration camps. In a letter to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Bruno's friend Alvin Rosenfeld explained of Bruno's beliefs, quote, "Bettelheim showed the world how extreme abuse such as concentration camp incarceration could severely distort personalities. That formed the basis of his treatment model and laid the foundation for much of our thinking about child abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder." And there is aspects of this that are positive and that are undeniably accurate. One of Bettelheim's legitimate achievements is that he is an early proponent of the idea that if you are working with emotionally disturbed or mentally ill children, and they are engaging in behavior that you don't want them to engage in,

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  your first task is to understand the internal logic of the child. Why do they think this is a good idea? Right? Why are they choosing to act in this way? Right? That you should seek to figure out why they want to do things. Right? In other words, what's going on in the kid's head is important. You know? That is a fairly unique idea at the time. Right? And that's a legitimate, you know, positive step.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  And also, I imagine, what are they getting out of it?

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  That like, what is reinforcing this behavior?

• 16:23Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes, I think that that's a big part of it. And that's overall, like, a good direction to be going. Unfortunately, Bettelheim has another belief. And it's one that he will talk openly about this idea that like, you need to understand why the child is making, that is doing the things that they're doing, their internal logic. He will also say the whole time, you should never use physical punishment on kids. You don't do it, there's no cause for it. The entire time he is working at this, he is running this school, he is physically punishing these kids. He just lies about it to parents and to academics by saying, don't do this, we never do this. The whole time he is using physical and mental abuse, to be very clear. Right?

• 17:06Robert Evans?

  And it's interesting to me that he knows he has to deny it. Right?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  The cognitive dissonance of life.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Because it's one thing to believe, like, I think physical, you know, punishment gets good results, but to know that, to like, also know enough to be like, no one will like that, or that's actually maybe not true, but that's what I want to do to get the quickest results, or, you know. It's horrifying. I mean, it is very interesting, like, all research shows that any form, any form of physical punishment is not helpful.

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Even, even spanking has been like, proven that it is not good.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  It's, it's interesting to me that if he were to have said at this time, obviously you spank kids, you know, sometimes you slap them a little bit, that would not have been controversial. That would have been in the 40s, well within the standards of like, normal childhood education, right? The fact that he's like, no, no, no, you should never do this, but is still doing it is so interesting to me.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  He's a deeply troubled man.

• 18:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This guy, Alvin Rosenfeld, who was Bruno's colleague and friend, defends the fact that, kind, partly defends the fact that Bettelheim uses physical violence. He argues that unlike most institutions at the time, the orthogenic school didn't use shock therapy, it didn't have restraints or any other violent tools, but sometimes the kids were so out of control that they needed physical intervention, and Bruno courageously handled that unpleasant task for his subordinates, assuring that, quote, "They were free to be far more nurturing." He admits that Bettelheim some times meted out punishment that included slaps, but he frames this as minor for the era. Now, I won't say that like, what he did was extreme for the era, but it wasn't mild, right? And we have a lot of reports from kids who were with him during this period of time,

• 18:59Robert Evans?

  and they do not report a mild experience. And I don't talk about this a lot on the show because I'm not an expert or an educator, but I did work in Special Ed as a paraprofessional for the better part of two years. And I'm unwilling to give detailed stories on the air for reasons that should be obvious and relate primarily to the privacy rights of those children, but I will say that I dealt with primarily kids who were frequently violent and who were about my size, right? These are 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds. And many of them are non, the term we would use at the time was nonverbal. And because of my size, I worked with these kids very closely because I could take a hit. And I was hit every day on that job, right?

• 19:40Robert Evans?

  One of my colleagues suffered a near fatal injury, a TBI, another had a broken jaw. So this was a, I understand sometimes you have to use restraints to protect yourself and others. Right with, with kids who, and some of the kids were what we would call emotionally disturbed. There were a variety of diagnoses that you had there. I'm aware of the needs sometimes to restrain kids. And so I want to emphasize that's not what's going on with Bruno, right? For one thing, restraining is sometimes, there's force involved in restraining a kid. It's not violent. Your job is not to harm them physically. Your job is to stop them from causing harm to themselves and others. And sometimes the only way to do that is to like physically hold them so that they can't hit somebody or whatever, right?

• 20:26Robert Evans?

  This is like a very difficult thing to do and to talk about. I really don't know how to get across. Like I'm very empathetic to the people who are good at this job. And I want to emphasize I had no training in it. We simply don't get training. Like that's another, a major, massive problem.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  That's horrifying.

• 20:42Robert Evans?

  It's, it's very, like I had a four hour class on like physical restraint and none of it, none of it was functional stuff.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And there's also different types of restraints and some are more harmful than others.

• 20:56Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And you know, as it was 15 years ago, I think it was very primitive and not of, we, we, we were not adequately trained to do the job. I can only imagine how bad it was in the 40s.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  But again, what Bruno is doing here, none of the stories that I have from other kids are, he had to make difficult choices because a kid was violent and presented a danger to others. They are all, he was annoyed at a behavior and so he hit a child, you know? That is what Bruno, and I really want to emphasize, I'm not naive about like the complex choices that have to be made sometimes here. That's not what's going on with Bruno. What he is doing to these kids is sadistic physical abuse on a level that I have trouble comprehending. One of Bruno's students is a kid named Ronald Andres. He spent 12 years at the orthogenic school during which he rarely saw his family. Bruno believed it was bad for students to have regular contact with loved ones,

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  and he pushed heavily for parents to keep their kids enrolled there for the entirety of their childhood, right? You are abusing your kid if you try to take them back and raise them in your home. That's bad for them. I have to have total control over them for the whole time they're children. Not a great sign there.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Anytime, anytime there's an encouragement for a child not to have direct communication with their parents, something bad is happening.

• 22:18Robert Evans?

  That's, that's such a good point, that like, anytime someone is being like, no, no, no, you really shouldn't see your kid, they're doing something fucked up, right? That's just, that's just, yeah, a very, probably a very durable truth. Speaking of durable truths, here's some ads.

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• 24:16Robert Evans?

  We're back. So we're talking about this, this, an article written by one of Bruno's students, Ronald Angres. Angres was diagnosed by Betelheim as autistic. We almost cert-- I will say certainly, I think, would not apply that diagnosis to Angres today because his primary symptoms were that like, he was bad at sports, he was a little slow learning how to read, and he like fidgeted sometimes. He had a thing for daydreaming. Everything that he describes is what I would call like, okay, well, you're just a kid. Some kids take longer to learn to read than others. Some kids aren't good at sports. I wasn't good at-- some kids fidget. You know, none of that is what I would call like, or what I think any expert would say, like diagnostic criteria for anything, really, right?

• 24:58Robert Evans?

  Like, they're not saying like, he was not incapable of like, learning how to read or anything. He was just a little slower than others. Fairly normal kid, right? But Angres' father was a psychoanalyst himself, and a rich one at that. And he diagnosed his child as disturbed for a variety of utterly anodyne reasons. Quote, "Sometimes I skipped while I paced. I had other unacceptable mannerisms, too. I sometimes talked to myself, lips moving when lost in thought." Again, these just sound like things people do.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Such an urge to over-pathologize.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Your kid's like, just talking to himself like children do.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And I also feel like there's, sometimes what happens is like-- The expectations people have for how children should behave is not realistic. So that it's like, oh, your kid didn't sit through a four hour movie without like wanting to get up and fidgeting. Something's wrong with them. It's like, no, developmentally, they're not going to be able to do that. That's a normal reaction.

• 25:58Robert Evans?

  Totally normal for, and that so much of what's going on here is that these are rich parents and they are annoyed that their kids maybe need a little bit of extra help, maybe aren't immediately ready to go to fancy dinner parties or the net or something, right? And so they're like, well, I'm just gonna have you, I'm gonna lock you up with this guy, this weirdo. That seems like much better.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Because they're children and they're only interested in adults. They just want their kid to act like an adult, to like, look cute.

• 26:23Robert Evans?

  I am a rich professional in the 1940s. I have high balls to drink and benzos to eat, you know? Like, I have no time to raise my own children. So Ronald's father's sense of professional ethics meant that he couldn't treat his own son. The orthogenic school has a reputa- had a reputation, has a reputation, it's still around, for feeding children very well. This is a, again, this is a high dollar institution. They have excellent food. It is an excellent space. It is a very immaculately clean. There is every kind of like piece of educational equipment is all state of the art, right? Very nice furniture. This is a nice place, right? I really need to emphasize that. If you look at it as a rich guy, you

• 27:05Robert Evans?

  will be impressed at the quality of the facility itself. Now Bruno would claim all his life that no child was ever admitted to the orthogenic school without having a chance to visit and decide for themselves to consent to come. Ronald says bullshit.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He says, "I was interviewed by Bruno, but I would never have consented to go to that school because from the moment we met, he was cruel and belittled me." Quote, "I drew for him a picture of a man. I don't remember now if he asked me to, but all the psychologists seemed to crave such pictures, and I may have tried in this fashion to break the ice. What a stupid and ugly picture," he snapped. "I did not yet know he fancied himself an art connoisseur. You did not draw his hands. They're behind his back," I explained. "You just did that because you can't draw hands. Do you know what it means when a boy can't draw hands? I did not. I still don't."

• 27:58Robert Evans?

  What the fuck does that mean? What does it mean, Bruno?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Hands are like objectively hard to draw.

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  Really difficult to draw hands.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. So much anger. Just like such a, such a angry view of the world and like such a, it's so funny, these people that like their whole goal is to like, get people to act correctly.

• 28:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Are so emotionally unregulated themselves.

• 28:31Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yes.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Like he, he got so outraged that this little boy didn't draw hands.

• 28:37Robert Evans?

  Didn't draw hands.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  You need to go do some deep breathing.

• 28:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Bruno. These are not appropriate reactions that you're having.

• 28:45Robert Evans?

  What does it mean when a child can't draw? And I want to continue that, that write up. "To appease him, I redrew the picture and added some hands, carefully showing all five fingers." "Preposterous! You drew the hands entirely out of proportion. They're bigger than his head." "Once more, he scowled darkly, as if I were expected to know the sinister significance of such a reversal of normal proportions." "He asked what I hoped to become when I grew up." "A scientist," I replied. "Ridiculous," he spat. "You want to be a scientist? You can't even read." Again, this is a child.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  He's like.

• 29:19Robert Evans?

  Holy fuck, dude.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Like a villain out of a Bond movie.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  What is, what is going on here, Bruno? Like, from the standards of a, of a period of time in which parenting was, shall we say, rough. Like, that is bad child rearing.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  It's also very funny to like, like imply that the children were allowed to give consent and had to give consent.

• 29:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Given that at that time period, I think the idea that children could give consent or should was like not a normal concept, like.

• 29:52Robert Evans?

  The idea that adults could give consent wasn't really a normal concept.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  But like, I feel like very few families like viewed children at that time as like, as autonomous individuals who were worthy of giving consent, you know, so like.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  No way was that happening.

• 30:08Robert Evans?

  And it's such a weird thing that he would insist on like telling. The lies he chooses to tell are always very strange to me.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  But they also, they also are revealing of how much he actually knows of what he's doing is wrong.

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. That's a very good point, that he does understand that this should be a thing the child consents to. Um, he just doesn't give a fuck. So

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Or maybe it's some guilt that he is

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And so his lies are around the things he feels shame

• 30:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Or regret around, and so he's lying to himself. Who knows?

• 30:39Robert Evans?

  If I tell the lie, I can normalize the behavior I know is good, even if I've fallen short. Right? Maybe it's something like that.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, like maybe I, well, I'm not doing it, but I'm, but I'm putting that out in the world.

• 30:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But I actually think this guy might think he is doing it. I mean, I think there might be just such a disconnect between

• 30:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  His actions and who he thinks he is.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that might, that may in fact be the case. Andres calls him rude after this point. Fair point to the kid. Uh, and he later wrote that he would have been utterly shattered if he'd known then that he was about to spend the remainder of his childhood in Bruno's care. Uh, so his parents send him to the school. Uh, when he starts at the orthogenic school, he's allowed to bring his favorite toys and the like with him. His prized possessions are his comic books, and as soon as Bruno sees them, he announces a new rule. No comic books. He also takes issue with one of Ronald's toys, a wooden train, which he called stupid.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  Man, it's a train.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Chill out.

• 31:37Robert Evans?

  What the fuck, dude? Now, this is all pretty abusive, but by far the worst thing. Well, I honestly, I don't know if the, like, it's all pretty bad, but he also uses physical violence against little kids. Um, here's how Andres later described his treatment at Bruno's hands. "I lived for years in terror of his beatings, an abject animal terror. I never knew when he would hit me or for what or how savagely. Bettelheim prized his unpredictability, no less than his unconventionality. As someone who saw the secret depths of men's souls, he glorified in defying ordinary notions of which offenses were important, or even what constituted an offense. What hostile character, he would say of me and countless other boys as he beat us publicly.

• 32:17Robert Evans?

  These beatings, which made the greatest impression on me of anything that I have known in life, stick in my memory as a grand performance of exultant rage."

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I think we're learning that that going through the amount of trauma that that Bruno went through.

• 32:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  When you don't like treat, treat it or get the support that you need.

• 32:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And, and when you then kind of claim psychology as something that you have ownership over, when you actually haven't done any work on yourself can be a really, a really nasty outcome.

• 33:03Robert Evans?

  And yeah, it's, it's interesting to me, it is probably worth really reemphasizing that he is not this way with that first kid. Now, he doesn't really spend much time parenting her, right? He's working, but that kid that he helps to raise in Austria, he's not hitting. At least she doesn't, she does not recall him being anything like this, right?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Well, he hadn't been in the camp yet.

• 33:25Robert Evans?

  He hadn't been in the camp yet. Yeah, he hadn't, I wonder how much of it is the camp and how much of it is like, he hadn't made himself, remade himself as a psychoanalytic expert yet, right? And I don't think you'll ever, you can ever like know, you know, which, which of these did more. But he's obviously, he's a very different guy in terms of how he treats children after the camps. And that's, that's something that like really deserves to be kind of reemphasized. To continue with Andres's story, "Once some all-school games were organized, we played musical chairs. A boy I shall call Seymour jumped into a seat before I could, and from then on until the end of the game, which I had to watch from the sidelines, he silently taunted me, smirking and wiggling his behind in time to the music,

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  which bumps in my direction. After the game finished, Seymour approached me with that gloating smirk still on his face. I said, 'I wish I could chop your head off.' The counselor promptly told Bettelheim, who just as promptly beat me, adding neck chops to his standard slaps and a denunciatory monologue in case I missed the poetic justice of it all." And again, you see like, pretty normal kid to say something like that, not a weird thing for a kid to say. This is a thing where you need to sit both of those kids down and talk to them. He's like, mock cuts his head off by hitting him in the neck, which also, you just, I mean, you shouldn't hit kids at all, but you certainly shouldn't hit children in the neck.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dog likes to, to like, walk on me in the morning. And when he puts his paw on my neck, I'm like, ow, that's such a sensitive, I, luckily, until I got this dog, I did understand how much neck, neck pressure hurts.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And like, the, the fucking, uh, uh, I mean, we could talk about, uh, choke chains and the like, which are also common at the time, but like, the, the kind of immediate willingness where he's like, this kid talked about cutting another kid's head off. Obviously, the right thing to do is hit him in the neck, you know, like, that's, that's a very telling logical leap that he makes there. Um, now, these stories that Angris tells are very consistent with the stories multiple other former students give of their time under Bruno's tutelage. And they are also, they also comport with the stories of employees who work as teachers and staff members at the orthogenic school during this time. One of those former staff members was a guy who wrote about his experiences for the Chicago Reader under

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  the pseudonym WB. I find his account valuable in part because Bruno's friend and defender, Alvin Rosenfeld, acknowledges that Bruno used physical violence, but also insists that most of the complaints from students, which he views as unfair, came from later in Bruno's career. And so he's like, well, they were angry because like, he was, you know, he, he kind of died before their education could finish. And so they, they, you know, they're, they're transmitting feeling, their feelings of abandonment to like, claiming he was abusive. And this guy's account puts the light of that. For one thing, WB comes to work at the school early on in Bruno's tutelage there. And he is a World War II combat veteran.

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  So this is not a guy who is inclined to be shocked by violence. Right? Like, if this guy reacts to your violence, you're really out of fucking pocket. Right? Quote, "A number of us were veterans who had probably seen more of life by age 21 than Bettelheim had seen at age 40." I do disagree with that because he was in the camps, man. But this guy's got, definitely has like a bit of a, an axe to grind with Bettelheim. "That fact never seemed to penetrate Bettelheim's low threshold of awareness of the true nature of the world around him. He tried to bully the counselors as much as he did the defenseless children in the school. He was just a bit more circumspect with us veterans." Now, he notes this guy that most orthogenic school employees were women. And that is a real thing Bruno does.

• 37:11Robert Evans?

  He likes to be surrounded by women. And these folks are very loyal to Bruno. WB describes the female employees at the school as like his Roman cohort. So these are like his power base, these, these, uh, these female counselors who Rosenfeld is like, "That's why Bruno had to do all the physical violence was so that these, these women could be free to be more nurturing," which is a very odd vibe. But that's the way people describe it. Quote, and this is from WB, "The understanding that most of the men had was that Bettelheim tried to seduce everyone into relating to him as their therapist. This was a condition of job tenure. Our general feeling was that most of the women accepted this relationship, but we never knew for sure.

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  Their job tenure was certainly longer than most of the men's. I would characterize the atmosphere at the orthogenic school at that time as the beginnings of a cult with Dr. B as the cult leader." And I find that interesting because he notes accurately this guy that part of cult dynamics is the creation of new vocabulary and the redefinition of existing vocabulary to create a new reality in which cult members live under. And this is how WB explains Bruno's use of terms like emotionally deterbed, disturbed, autistic, and schizophrenic. These are not real medical diagnoses, but these are terms reinvented by Bruno to create a reality that's convenient to him. Right?

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  And he will say, "He has an 85% success rate in treating schizophrenia and autism." And that 85% of the kids that came into his school left it without these diagnoses.

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  He's not curing these people. He is declaring them to have a thing and then declaring them cured when they behave in a way that he describes as idealized, right? And that's kind of key to it, is that he gets described as brilliant for a while because of this big 85% success rate. He is the only person judging these kids.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I mean, this is like a thing that happens in society, the, these like, um, troubled teen industry, like this is not like an isolated incident of this kind of group, where these kids are declared as so problematic and then taken into this extreme environment. And then you sort of have a cult-like figure at the helm and, and all of these employees sort of just like go along with this, even though it's like, it is like this dynamic that sort of has, that continues to sort of play out. And so there are definitely, I, I, like, I'm someone who finds, like, I don't think it's so wild to describe things as, as cults or as cult-like if they follow certain, you know,

• 39:53Speaker 01

  descriptors, and this, this definitely feels, feels rather culty to me.

• 39:58Robert Evans?

  If the Kool-Aid bowl fits, right?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I mean, the difference is that these kids are not, are not members of the cult in the way you would see in other situations. They're, they're sort of the prisoners of, of the cult.

• 40:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I think WB is trying to describe a lot of the employees.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Employees are the members.

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  Although, the financial relationship, again, and he's like, it's, I don't really know how much did they buy it? Did they just need the job, right? Like, it was unclear to him and it will be forever to us. But I do find it noteworthy that he says this. "Bettelheim was a professional success. Why? Simple. He defined a child's problem without any meaningful critical peer review, and then proceeded to solve the problem, again, without critical review. A generally compliant and emotionally dependent staff then put their impremature on his self-declared and widely proclaimed success." And yeah, um, and it's, it's, yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  He's creating the rules of the world.

• 40:54Robert Evans?

  He gets, and the world is a lot, it's a lot easier. Life is much easier when you get to do that.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:00Robert Evans?

  Now, while when Bruno directs the orthogenic school, he's also kind of the Dr. Phil of like the 40s through the 50s, 60s, you know, to some extent in like the 70s in that he's, he's a constant presence on TV and he is brought in as an expert on disturbed children. When there's a horrible crime, you know, when there's, he's also brought in to talk about concentration camps, antisemitism. And this is deeply unfortunate because Bruno is not really an expert on disturbed children. And he's increasingly identifies himself as white and identifies his old Jewish identity as problematic. And so the fact that he is a major public figure on all of these things is a real issue.

• 41:42Robert Evans?

  Near the end of the 1940s, he's asked to speak at Hillel House on modern antisemitism. And he told the assembled, almost entirely Jewish audience, antisemitism, whose fault is it? Yours, because you don't assimilate. It's your fault. If you assimilated, there would be no antisemitism. Why don't you assimilate? Now, people don't take this lying down. This is offensive to the audience?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  This is like satire.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  Like, holy shit, man, what?

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  And one member of the audience, Eric Schopter, is like, wait a second, if you're saying the solution to antisemitism is to end Jewishness, what makes you different from an antisemite? And Bruno responds, I'm only a doctor prescribing the cure, not an answer.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Well, he is 100% an antisemite.

• 42:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's, I mean, problematic.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  I had this great professor in grad school who's, you know, because psychology is a tricky field, like we were alluding to, like there can really be an unequal level of power and these people that claim to like know everything. And he, he was always like, if anyone tells you that they're certain about anything, like the way he goes on these TV shows and is like certain about these disturbed children, do not trust them.

• 43:00Robert Evans?

  That is very good advice. And particularly in Bruno's case, because as the years go on, he becomes one of the first public intellectual experts on autism, right? In 1967, he publishes a book called The Empty Fortress, which is one of the first influential and famous books on the treatment of children with autism in US history. And again, let me remind you, Bruno's PhD is not in any relevant medical discipline, and that so far as we know, he mostly lied about his psychoanalytic credentials in Austria. The Empty Fortress, in his book's title, relates to what Bruno saw as the cause of autism. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Autism History Project. "Children took shelter there from the cruelty and indifference of their parents, mothers especially, who were supposed to love them,

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  but instead denied their humanity. The cost was impossibly high. Forced into rational solitude behind walls that shielded them from the very people whose attention they craved, babies were frozen out of normal development." In other words, he believed autism came from your mom ignoring you, right?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Wow, that's so original. Yeah, that's like, you know, out of nowhere.

• 44:08Robert Evans?

  Out of nowhere, blaming the moms. Yeah. So he saw the primary cause of autism as refrigerator mothers. These are emotionally cold and distant women. And again, he'll describe his mom as one of these later in life. You know, I mean, he starts to at around this time. Now, one allegation that you'll find here is that Bruno takes his mommy issues and turns them into what was for years... This is never the standard explanation for the origins of autism in the medical sense, but because of Bruno's prominence, it's a very common explanation, right? Because people hear this on TV, they see the book, and they're like, oh, okay, that must be it. Now, responsible articles today will note accurately that this is horseshit.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  The origins of autism are almost certainly genetic and 100% not caused by your mom being a refrigerator.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Or vaccines.

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  Or vaccines. Very important to note, also not caused by that.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  I also feel like historically, people often blame schizophrenia on mothers, too.

• 45:08Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  And it makes sense that those are the two main things that he's treating.

• 45:12Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And it's also worth noting that autism was often called childhood schizophrenia at the time, too. Like, these are, these terms are very much, again, I really need to reemphasize that. I also should emphasize that even articles today often say very fucked up things about autism. I want to read an excerpt from a 2021 art article in the Chicago Tribune about Bruno Bettelheim and about him getting the causes of autism wrong. Quote, "Even a quick look at children who were abused or neglected by parents should make it obvious that autism is a completely different kind of problem. Eventually, autism will probably be treated with gene therapy, or effective medications will be developed to counter the defect."

• 45:54Robert Evans?

  Now, that's just eugenics, right? That's just eugenics that you wrote in 2021, guy at the Chicago Tribune? That's just eugenics.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Gosh, call it like explicitly calling it a defect?

• 46:07Robert Evans?

  No!

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a, I mean, I, there continues to be so much debate about like ABA therapy for children and autism. I'm, I'm sure you probably in the work you did in special ed experienced a lot of that. And, and it's, it's the difference of approaches between we have to change this person to interact with the world as we see fit.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Versus maybe we allow this person to be who they are and create a world where that's okay.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  Yep. And there's, yeah, this is something that is still developing. I just, I want to note, I just read that, that article and was like, oh, my God, man, you're not any better than Bruno was, dude. I mean, I guess, like. This is still a real problem that this podcast is not going to kind of deal with in all of the depth that it deserves, but I wanted to make a note of that. In his piece for Commentary magazine, Ronald Angres makes a note that even though the state of autism treatment and knowledge was more primitive at the time, there was ample evidence in the early days to suggest that Bruno's empty fortress hypothesis was nonsense. Quote, "In fact, there was always evidence that autism may be at least partially neurological.

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Everyone before Bettelheim believed it was. No one but Bettelheim and his most fervent followers ever believed otherwise. And even on Bettelheim's assumption that the origins were psychological rather than biological or neurological, why go on, as he did, to accuse parents of such crimes, such schizophrenic symptoms as wishing their child did not exist? Bettelheim made an art of accusation. He did not sort of blame victims. He set himself up as their special prosecutor." Right? Yeah, which is an interesting and a damning way to describe that. I think this is our second ad break, so let's just go for it.

• 48:04Robert Evans?

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• 49:39Robert Evans?

  We're back. So it has been noted that Bruno's victim blaming of concentration camp internees bore more than a little resemblance to the way he talked about the parents of "autistic children." The identification of the aggressor, which he saw as core to the behavior of inmates, is also what he believed went on with autism. "Kids with so-called refrigerator moms ape that behavior and locked away their emotions from the empty fortress." This is Bruno's writing here. "I had experienced being at the mercy of forces that seemed beyond one's ability to influence and with no knowledge of whether or when the experience would end, of living isolated from family and friends, of being severely restricted in the sending and receiving of information. Perhaps this sudden reversal helped me first to understand how the camps could destroy personality and later to resume with, I hope, greater insights and empathy, my earlier

• 50:24Robert Evans?

  task, that of creating a milieu which would favor the reconstruction of personality." Right? And this is him literally being like, "The camps taught me that I could cure autism by making my own camp," right?

• 50:37Robert Evans?

  Now, violence was not his only tool for reconstructing personality, but insults and mockery were among his go-to tactics, and behind every effort he made was the promise of violence. This is why he pushed parents to enroll their children in his facility for the entirety of their childhood. He needed the privacy of total control to ensure he was not stopped. From that write-up in Disability Studies Quarterly, one former student called it "a dumping ground for young people who were different in some way or who, for whatever reason, didn't match their parents' expectations." Bettelheim was known to slap and punch children. He would often tell his students that they were at the orthogenic school because their parents couldn't stand them. He called them "megalomaniacs." And neurotics and force them into uncomfortable or violent situations against their will.

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  Children were expected to shower naked in front of the staff and one another throughout their stay, regardless of age or comfort level. And many students and staff were physically or sexually abused. Jacqueline Sanders worked for Bettelheim for 13 years and became the director of the school after Bettelheim left. She writes, "We became the abusers of abused children."

• 51:44Speaker 01

  I mean, sort of going back to what we were saying, like the the victims are not just the kids there, it's probably also the staff that are sort of in like under this man's like control and manipulation and it's, I mean, it's a mini little hell that he has built.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  He has created a little hell for kids and for staff members. Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  Now, students at this school were expected to work towards admission to higher education, and the school had an excellent record for this, which has led some defenders, including former students, who like most will say his violence was unacceptable, to declare the school overall still a success. And this brings me to the book, "The Creation of Dr. B." by Richard Pollock. One criticism that he will get from Bettelheim's defenders is that, given his own history with the school, he can't be objective. You see, Richard's brother Stevens started out as a day student at the orthogenic school. But Bettelheim insisted, as always, that he come to live there full time. Richard writes, "Over the months, he made fewer and fewer visits home, becoming for me a kind of spectral sibling even before his death in 1948."

• 52:53Robert Evans?

  Now, Stevens' death occurred when he was away from the school on a rare holiday visit with his family. He and his brother were staying at a farm owned by a friend of the family, and he fell through a hay shoot several stories to the ground and died on impact. If you grew up on a farm, you immediately are like, oh yeah, that's absolutely how a little kid could die, right? It's one of the most dangerous things in any kind of farm is a hay shoot. It's just this hole that's going to be covered by hay a lot of the time, and if you go through it, you could fall quite a distance. So. Bettelheim refuses to accept, oh, a tragic accident occurred, right? He blames Rick and Steven's parents for killing their son because they wanted to spend time with him and they should have just left him at the school full time.

• 53:36Robert Evans?

  Now, decades later, Bettelheim still holds on to this grudge because in the late night, again, this happens in 48, in the late 1980s, Pollock, who's writing a book about Bettelheim, calls on him. And Bettelheim still remembers these parents and is still angry at them. Quote, "My father, he dismissed as crude and somewhat simple minded, a schlemiel who played the bills and stayed out of emotional problems. My mother was the villain. He said she paraded as a saint and a martyr, when in fact, she was almost entirely responsible for my brother's problems. With astonishing anger, he said she had rejected Steven at birth and that to cope with this lockout, he had developed pseudo-feeble mindedness. He said that my brother was a lovely child who manifested a sensitivity my mother wished she possessed, and he castigated her for never conceding that she was responsible for Steven's

• 54:21Robert Evans?

  distress and for insisting against the school's wishes that he be allowed periodic home visits."

• 54:27Speaker 01

  It's interesting that everyone has the exact same problem.

• 54:29Robert Evans?

  That everyone has the same problems he has with his parents?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  That every family is the exact same dynamic.

• 54:34Robert Evans?

  That's the only kind of person? Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  And it's weird that it's also the dynamic he came from.

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, their dad was like his dad, their mom was like his mom. Wild stuff. So Bettelheim declares in this conversation with no evidence, no, your brother committed suicide because he was so unhappy with your parent. Again, he fell through a hay shoot, man. He insinuated the fact that their mom worked full time was part of why their brother killed himself. And he ranted, "What is it about these Jewish mothers, Mr. Pollock?" In his book, Richard continued, "In 1956, I would discover he had written that the school had warned my parents that a home visit for Steven was ill advised because he might harm himself. Despite our objection, the visit took place and the child died in a carefully contrived accident.

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  Bettelheim told me with utter confidence that Steven had once purposefully fallen out of a speedboat near the propellers, and it was only a matter of time before he found a situation like the loft in which his efforts at killing himself would succeed. In fact, my brother had never fallen out of any boat." And that anecdote really says a lot that he just, he just lied to this kid about his brother's death for no rea- not for no reason, because inventing fiction lets him redefine reality, right? And that's the essence of his pedagogy, right? Is you get to define the reality for these children and thus of the world. Like, that's how maybe, you know, this is to some extent him taking back control over the world, which was so chaotic for him.

• 56:10Robert Evans?

  But I don't know, like, that's fascinating to me.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  If something doesn't fit his narrative, then he will create the details to make it fit.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Which is a really great strategy for you, but it's-

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  For him, it works, yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It also allows him to never have to confront any of his own demons.

• 56:31Robert Evans?

  No, and he's such a, so during the Vietnam War, Bruno makes a name for himself as an anti-anti-war activist. And confoundingly, he describes the kids protesting against Vietnam as neo-Nazis, who were very sick and paranoics trying to beat down father to show they are a big boy. I don't know if that's what's, maybe they don't want to get drafted and go die and denang, man?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  I feel like this is like, should be like a learning, like a learning moment about these people that take over our media today.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Like, there are so many people, like, with these kinds of characteristics and these, these like really abhorrent personalities who people fall for.

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  And to become like really influential and claim to have a lot of knowledge around wellness and psychology and the right way to be a person. And it's just a, it's just a reminder to be, to be more skeptical of what people present to you as the truth.

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  Maybe don't trust those people, yeah. In 1976, you had asked in part one, when does the backlash against a lot of what he's saying about the Holocaust begin? And as I said, there's some immediately, but kind of, there's a big chunk of academic backlash starts in the late 70s when American Holocaust scholar Terence De Perez writes a book about the survivors of death camps and concentration camps. His book, The Survivor, was partly a broadside against the misinformation Bettelheim had contributed to the discussion. And I want to quote now from an article by Paul Rosen. "Throughout The Survivor, De Perez criticized Bettelheim for having supposed that it was correct to have thought that prisoners ever regressed to infantilism.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  De Perez believed that The Survivor should be viewed as reminders, not of human weaknesses, but of evil circumstances that were objectively powerful. Both the Nazis and Stalin's regime subjected prisoners to filth for the sake of humiliation and debasement. De Perez argued that prisoner behavior in response to such circumstances was not childish, but rather a heroic response to dreadful necessities. He cited one camp where the inmates burned it down and found throughout the literature instances of people who somehow managed to maintain their inward sanctity. Resistance took subtle shapes, and De Perez explored the way human dignity endured and the form of freedom from the entire control by external forces. Survivors helped one another, engaged in acts of sabotage, and from Buchenwald, made

• 59:02Robert Evans?

  contact with the Allies for a bombing raid on SS parts of the camp. De Perez pointed out that Bettelheim was imprisoned during a special period when criminals among inmates wielded power. He disputed Bettelheim's notion that social bonding among prisoners was absent, nor was it true, De Perez argued, that they did not hate their oppressors and did not sometimes revolt. According to De Perez, Bettelheim had felt superior to his fellow sufferers, and his account was factually marred by his egotistical obsession with autonomy that blinded him to the extent of the mutual support that existed within the camps."

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Sounds right to me.

• 59:35Robert Evans?

  Sounds accurate to me.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, Bettelheim responds with an article in The New Yorker arguing that Depress's book missed the realities of the experience. And Depress responds a little later with an article of his own called "The Bettelheim Problem." He links Bruno's conclusions about the causes of autism and schizophrenia to his supposed observations about camp life. In a way, he seemed to be taking out his righteous anger on the SS Guards, on the parents of his students. The ultimate product of this was that these people, who lived for years without their children, had to do so believing they were the ultimate cause of their children's problems, right? Like, which is bad.

• 1:00:16Robert Evans?

  In 1980-

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  And it also, it's also a great manipulation tactic, right?

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Because as soon as you're like, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't let this kid be in the school for their entire childhood." It's like, "Oh, well, actually, though, I'm the person causing them harm. If I were to reunite with my kid, I'd actually be doing them more harm."

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly. That's a very good point, right? And that's such a key part of what Bettelheim is saying, is that like, you have fucked your kids up. You gave them these conditions. Only I can fix them, right?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  It becomes dangerous for you to be involved in their life.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  And that's why when this mom, when Richard, his biographer's, like, mom insists that her other son at least gets some time with the family, Bruno has to turn around and make that kid's death be caused by that, right? In 1985, Bruno's wife, Trudie, passed on. Despite his early, some early infidelities, he was, by all accounts, dedicated to his wife, and most people who knew him will say that her passing broke him. He was, by this point, an old man in poor health, and so on March 13th, 1990, Bruno Bettelheim took his own life. Now, the fact that he committed suicide was just about the most understanding thing he ever did. He was old, he was ailing. He would write a lot about the fact that he no longer felt he could be of service to

• 1:01:33Robert Evans?

  society. And so, like, I don't have trouble understanding why he did this, but the fact that he killed himself sent a shock through the psychoanalytic and educational community. And while the criticism of him for committing suicide was unjust, which is a big part of the initial reaction to his death, is people being like, "Oh, well, the fact that a psychoanalyst would do this must have meant that he was never, he wasn't as healthy as he portrayed himself as being." And that's bad. That's a bad way to look at the suicide of an old man whose wife just died and he was in poor health. It also weirdly opens up the floodgates for the survivors of his teaching practices to talk about what they had endured. And that's why things are kind of messy is that the first wave of criticism of

• 1:02:15Robert Evans?

  Bettelheim happens alongside people criticizing him for committing suicide, which is messy. But you do get a lot of these survivors start talking in 1990 and continue talking up to the present day. Like there's, again, some of the writings that I found on this was like much more recent as a result of the fact that like, you know, people are still processing this. There's folks who initially were like, well, but no, the school was a good thing for me overall, who kind of come to different conclusions. There's also still plenty of schools who are like, yeah, it was brutal at times, but students who were like, it was brutal, but it prepared me for success. I'm not going to judge how anybody interprets their own experience at this school. I will say, one of the things people say for Bruno,

• 1:02:59Robert Evans?

  which is that so many of his graduates went on to have excellent careers. Well, but yeah, but also all their parents were super rich. I don't know if we give that to Bruno, right? Like, like their parents were all rich as hell. Maybe that had more to do with it. I don't know. Like, not to take anything away from them, but I don't, I just don't know that I give that to Bruno.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  And I also, I'm not surprised, like you, that he died by suicide because I don't think he was mentally well his whole life.

• 1:03:26Robert Evans?

  No, God, no.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  I don't think that he was ever at peace with himself or had like, the ability to emotionally regulate or, you know, live a values driven life. Like, I think he wasn't in constant turmoil since his childhood. And so, the outcome is not, is not so shocking to me.

• 1:03:50Robert Evans?

  Nope, nope, not at all. Well, that's the story.

• 1:03:56Robert Evans?

  How we feel it?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I guess I I'll do my annoying mental health advocacy thing of

• 1:04:04Robert Evans?

  There we go, there we go.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Saying I veer away from using the term committed suicide because it implies that it's a crime.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  So I prefer like the language of died by suicide.

• 1:04:18Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Just but, you know, who would I be if I'm not someone to say that?

• 1:04:24Robert Evans?

  No, you know, and honestly, like, it's interesting because I hadn't I never really thought about the fact that like, yeah, using the term committing does imply that like, there's a crime that's because we only use that word, right? You wouldn't say like, I committed lunch today, right?

• 1:04:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just so normalized. Yeah, interesting.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Robert Evans?

  No, I think that's a good point, yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like, it's interesting, like, as a writer and as a also then it's someone in the mental health field. I am always thinking about like, the the impact of the word choice that we use. And like, how how we are actually like subtly sending these like messages to ourselves and to other people. But then sometimes I'll be like, I don't get why that's a problem. But then you listen to someone where it's, you know, their point of view. And it's like, OK, well, even if I still don't get it, I'll I'll make the change. But that the the phrase when someone explained it to me in that way of that it's like a crime, then it finally clicked for me about why I don't want to use that term anymore.

• 1:05:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I it's like, the most understandable like thing about his whole story. Like, there's so many choices that he makes and it's like, well, I don't really get where that comes from. Like, I it's interesting that the first thing he gets criticized for is that and not anything about like how he treated children or whatever. Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  It's. It just feels like a very pertinent topic to be talking about. Like, I think that there's this sense that, like, he died in 1990. We have like a different understanding of autism now. But I feel like we're on a cusp of like, of really not having made the progress that we think we have made in psychology and in like, wellness culture. And so it's like a reminder to be like, very vigilant about like, falling for these people who have such extreme takes and claim to have the only way to handle things

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  and are very victim blaming and, you know, separate, separate people as a means of control.

• 1:06:31Robert Evans?

  Especially now. Like, we are heading into a whole new golden era for that. Anyway, you got any, anything you want to plug, kind of at the end here?

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Well, we have to keep going. So if you're, if you're in the mood for, for something light, I have a rom com novel called Save the Date, coming out April 8th, that you can order wherever books are sold. It's a kind of autofiction based off of my own broken engagement and what could have happened if I had tried to find a new groom in time for my original wedding. I didn't do that in real life, but it's based off a joke my dad made and I turned it into a book. And then I also have my Substack called Emotional Support Lady, which is all about mental health. And you can also hire me as a relationship coach for both individuals or couples.

• 1:07:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on today. This was a hard one to listen to and I appreciate you doing so much to try and like, explain, yeah, what, what was happening here? Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Right. And how, and how long it took for society to catch up to the lies.

• 1:07:37Robert Evans?

  Geez, like, half a century, literally, almost half a century. Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Even though, even though the people he was talking about were saying this is wrong while it was happening.

• 1:07:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  And that wasn't enough.

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All right, well, that's the episode, everybody. Thank you so much and thank you, Alison. All right, have a good week.

• 1:08:00Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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