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

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 been the guy to figure out the wrong way.
Had to lose all sympathy. 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.
I'm good. What I didn't reveal in episode one, which I feel like will be more relevant for this part 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 someone that is at all against taking children's mental health seriously.
And It's like kind of a lot of the activism I do. But I think we're about to explore a scenario where that goes wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong. Yes, exactly.
Well, it's also, you know, it's interesting because a big part of Bruno's story and a big part of like where people go wrong, because like because 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 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, 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 is 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.
And also, like, we're still getting stuff wrong now. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Tons of them. Then it was, but it's still a flawed system.
And there's also a lot of debate about the merits of diagnosing at all. Yeah.
I'm someone that has found comfort and sort of clarity in being diagnosed and have had my diagnosis pretty much my whole life. But a lot of people don't feel that way.
And so it's an interesting debate. And they feel totally different about it than in the 40s.
One thing they do constantly is diagnose kids as psychotic, right? Which you cannot today. That is not something that happens.
Because the idea that you would diagnose a child as being a psychopath, right, is very normal then, right? Well, now they'll do oppositional defiant disorder. Right, right.
Which is like a pathway or whatever towards that eventual diagnosis. Yeah.
But there are certain restraints around what age you can call people certain, what age you can give them certain things. And that just like, it's the Wild West in Bruno's era.
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Now, Bruno has, at the time we've, you know, we're starting up here, he has just gotten over to the U.S. He has escaped the Holocaust, and he has gotten a job.
He's started out. He started out as an academic.
He had lost his family business at this point. He has no money, but this lady who he had helped raise her daughter is kind of taking care of them.
And the understanding is that they need to figure out something, but they're not on the streets or 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 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.
It just feeds his persecution and everything that's happened to him until then. 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 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. 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 whose parents have money.
So this is not like the worst versions of these facilities, right? 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? Ah, yes.
Yes. When we say above average intellect, right? These are kids whose parents have money and thus our goal is to make sure they have a future, right? It would be fun to go through history and find all the different euphemisms for rich white kids.
And when the school is founded in 1915, they use these. They don't say this is a school for rich white kids.
They say 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.
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 yes like i can no longer be viewed as other um 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.
Especially not at this time. No.
And it's his way of, of like making sure that he's in with the, with the people in power. And he is, he has, he does a lot of writing about his attitudes that like, he doesn't like Christianity either.
Cause 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 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 not from a Christian background, I want to acculturate them as white Christians, right? Me, a Jewish man, would love to do that. 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. That person doesn't look exactly like me.
I have to commit a crime. I can't handle it.
I can't handle it. I'm going to go rob a bank.
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- That's in the 40s? That's in the 40s.
Wow. This is 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 something like 10 to 12, right? He, his, 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.
But then if you do, they come out great, but then, then they come out. But if they see a person with different color of skin, they will start screaming.
No, you gotta give, you gotta let me have them until they're like 20, you know, make sure they don't see anybody else. They can't see anyone else or they will lose it.

Yeah. There's like 40 to 60 kids at this institution at a given time.
Now, the 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, 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 gas chambers, right? 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. 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.
That was kind of your reaction, huh, Bruno? He was just like, no, I've just become a Nazi. Therefore, everyone else must have as well.
Okay. 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, in his opinion, that's handling them.
Right. 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? Not like developmentally delayed in a physical way. 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.

The whole time he was in that camp,

he was like, these are good ideas. These are good.
If it wasn't the Nazis doing them, I wouldn't have it like. That's what he's taking a lot of notes on.
He's taking some wild things from his experience. 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, 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 positive step. And also, I imagine, what are they getting out of it? Right.
What is reinforcing this behavior? Right. Yes.
I think that that's a big part of it. And that's overall a good direction to be going.
Unfortunately, Bettelheim has another belief, and it's one that he will talk openly about this idea that you need to understand why the child 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 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. And it's interesting to me that he knows he has to deny it.
Right. The cognitive dissonance.
yeah yeah because because i it's one thing to 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 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 of physical punishment is not helpful. Right.
Even spanking has been like proven that it is not good. 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.
He's a deeply troubled man. Yeah.
Yeah, This guy, Alvin Rosenfeld, who was Bruno's colleague and friend, defends the fact that, 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 sometimes 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, 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? 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 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 need 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? This is like a very difficult thing to do and to talk about. I really don't know how to get across.
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. That's another major, massive problem.
It's very... I had a four-hour class on physical restraint and none of it was functional stuff.
And there's also different types of restraints and some are more harmful than others.

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

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 hid a child.
That is what Bruno, and I really want to emphasize, I'm not naive about 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 Ongres.
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, 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.
Anytime there's an encouragement for a child not to have direct communication

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See Mint Mobile for details. we're back so we're talking about this, an article written by one of Bruno's students, Ronald Ongres.
Ongres was diagnosed by Bettelheim as autistic. We almost, I will say certainly, I think would not apply that diagnosis to Ongres 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, diagnostic criteria for anything, really. They're not saying he was not incapable of learning how to read or anything.
He's just a little slower than others. Fairly normal kid, right? But Angra's 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 talk to myself, lips moving when lost in thought.
Again, these just sound like things people do. Such an urge to over pathologize.
Yeah. Yeah.
Your kid's like just talking to himself like like children do like 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 yeah they they're not gonna be able to do that. That's a normal reaction.
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 Met 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.
Because they're children, and they're only interested in adults. They just want their kid to act like an adult, but like look cute.
I am a rich professional in the 1940s. I have highballs 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 had a reputation, has a reputation, it's still around, for feeding children very well.

Again, this is a high-dollar institution.

They have excellent food.

It is an excellent space.

It is a very immaculately clean.

Every kind of piece of educational equipment is all state- 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 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.
Yeah, right. 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 seem 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. What the fuck does that mean? What does it mean, Bruno? Hands are objectively hard to draw.
It's really difficult to draw hands. Yeah.
Wow. So much anger.
Just like such 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 yeah are so emotionally unregulated themselves yes yes like he got so outraged that this little boy didn't draw hands. It's like, you need to go do some deep breathing.
Yeah. Bruno.
These are not appropriate reactions that you're having. What does it mean when a child can't draw? And I want to continue 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.
oh my god he's like holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy

holy ridiculous he spat you want to be a scientist you can't even read again this is a child

oh my god he's like holy fuck dude villain out of a bond movie what is what is going on here bruno like from the standards of a period of time in which parenting was shall we say rough. Like, that is bad

child rearing.

It's also very funny to

imply that the children were allowed to give consent and had to give consent yeah given that at that time period i think the idea that children could give consent or should was like not a normal concept like the idea that adults could give consent wasn't really a normal concept 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 no way was that happening 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 but they also they also are revealing of how much he actually knows of what he's doing is wrong yes yes that's a very good point that he does understand that this should be a thing the child consents to he just doesn't give a fuck so or maybe it's some guilt that he has and so his lies are around the things he feels shame or regret around. And so he's lying to himself.
Who knows? 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. Oh, yeah.
Like maybe I well, I'm not doing it, but I'm but I'm putting that out in the world. Right.
But I actually think this guy might think he is doing it. I mean, I think there might be just such a disconnect between

his actions and who he thinks he is.

Yeah, I think that may in fact

be the case. Angrez

calls him rude after this point. Fair

point to the kid. 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. So his parents send him to

the school. 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. Man, it's a train.
Chill out. What the fuck, dude? No, this is all pretty abusive, but by far the worst thing.
Well, honestly, I don't know if the, like it's all pretty bad, but he also uses physical violence against little kids. Here's how Angres 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. 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.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think we're learning that going through the amount of trauma that Bruno went through.

Yeah. When you don't treat it or get the support that you need.
In any way deal with it. Yeah.
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, really nasty outcome. And yeah, 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 does not recall him being anything like this, right?

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

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 um 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 re-emphasized to continue with angers's story once some all- 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, 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 like mock cuts his 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. Yeah, my dog likes 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 yeah, luckily, until I got this dog, I didn't understand how much neck pressure hurts.

Yeah. And like the fucking, I mean, we could talk about choke chains and the like, which are

also common at the time.

But like 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. That's a very telling, logical leap that he makes there.
Now, these stories that Angra's tells are very consistent with the stories multiple other former students give of their time under Bruno's tutelage, and 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 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 he kind of died before their education could finish.
And so they're transmitting their feelings of abandonment to 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.
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 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. 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 cohorts. So these are like his power base, these female counselors who Rosenfeld is like, that's why Bruno had to do all the physical violence was so that 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.
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 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? 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.
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.

Well, it's – I mean this is like a thing that happens in society, these like troubled teen industry. Oh,.
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 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, descriptors. And this this definitely feels feels rather culty to me.
If the Kool-Aid bowl fits, right? Yeah. I mean, the difference is that these kids are not members of the cult in the way you would see in other situations.
They're sort of the prisoners of the cult. Yeah, and I think WB is trying to describe a lot of the employees.
The employees are the members. Although the financial relationship, again, and he's like, 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 than put their imprimatur on his self-declared and widely proclaimed success.
And yeah. Um, and it's, it's yeah.
He's creating the rules of the world. He gets, and the world is a lot, it's a lot easier.
Life is much easier when you get to do that. Right.
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.
And that he's a constant presence on TV. And he is brought in as an expert on disturbed children.
When there's a horrible crime, he's also brought in to talk about concentration camps, anti-Semitism, and this is deeply unfortunate because Bruno is not really an expert on disturbed children, and he 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.
Near the end of the 1940s, he's asked to speak at Hillel House on modern anti-Semitism. And he told the assembled almost entirely Jewish audience, anti-Semitism, whose fault is it? Yours, because you don't assimilate.
It's your fault. If you you assimilated there would be no anti-semitism why don't you assimilate now people don't take this lying down this is offensive to the audience this is like satire like holy shit man what and one member of the audience eric shopter, is like, wait a second.

If you're saying the solution to anti-Semitism is to end Jewishness, what makes you different from an anti-Semite? And Bruno responds, I'm only a doctor prescribing the cure. Not an answer.
Well, he is 100% an anti-Semite. Yeah, that's, I mean, problematic.
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

certain about these disturbed children, do not trust them. 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 U.S. history.
Again, let me remind you, Bruno's Ph.D. is not in any relevant medical discipline.
And 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 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? Yep. Wow.
That's so original. Yeah.
That's like out of nowhere for someone to blame it all on 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. I mean, he starts doing it 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.
The origins of autism are almost certainly genetic and 100% not caused by your mom being a refrigerator. Or vaccines, it feels important to say.
Very important to note, also not caused by that. I also feel like historically people often blame schizophrenia on mothers too.
Yes, yes. And it makes sense that those are the two main things that he's treating.
Yes, yes. And it's also worth noting that autism was often called childhood schizophrenia at the time too.
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 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. Now, that's just eugenics, right? That's just eugenics that you wrote in 2021, Guy at the Chicago Tribune.
That's just eugenics. Oh, my gosh.
Call it like explicitly calling it a defect. No, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 mean, there continues to be so much debate about ABA therapy for children in autism. I'm sure you probably did the work you did in special ed, experienced a lot of that.
And it's the difference of approaches between we have to change this person to interact with the world as we see fit versus maybe we allow this person to be who they are and create a world where that's okay. Yeah.
And there's, yeah, this is something that is still developing. I just, I want to note, I just read that in that article and was like, oh my God, man, you're not any better than Bruno was, dude.
I mean, I guess 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 Ongres 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.
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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 quote-unquote 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 aped that behavior and locked away their emotions.
From the empty fortress, this is Bruno who'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 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? 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 forced them into uncomfortable or violent situations against their will. Children were expected to shower naked in front of the staff and one another throughout their stay, regardless of age back to what we were saying, like 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.
He has created a little hell for kids and for staff members. Yeah.
Yeah. 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 Stephen 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. Now, Stephen's 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 chute 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 chute.
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. Now, decades later, Bettelheim still holds onto this grudge.
Again, this happens in 48. In the late 1980s, Polak, 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 Stephen 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 Stephen's distress, and for insisting against the school's wishes that he'd be allowed periodic home visits.
It's interesting that everyone has the exact same problem. That everyone has the same problems he has with his parents? That every family is the exact same dynamic.
That's the only kind of person? Yeah. And it's weird that it's also the dynamic he came from.
Yeah. 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. And again, he fell through a hay chute, 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.
Polak? 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 Stephen was kid about his brother's death for no reason. Not for no reason,

because inventing fiction... And that anecdote really says a lot that he just he just will lie to this kid about his brother's death for no reason.

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.
But I don't know, like that's fascinating to me. If something doesn't fit his narrative, then he will create the details to make it fit.
Exactly. Which is a really great strategy for you.
For him, it works.

It also allows him to never have to confront any of his own demons. 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 paranoiacs trying to beat down father to show they are a big boy. Oh, my God.
I don't know if that's what's – maybe they don't want to get drafted and go die in Da Nang, man. Like – I feel like this is like – should be like a learning – like a learning moment about these people that take over our media today.
Yeah. Like there are so many people like with these kinds of characteristics and these, these like really abhorrent personalities who people fall for.
Yep. 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 reminder to be more skeptical of what people present to you as the truth. 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 there's a big chunk of academic backlash.
It starts in the late 70s when American Holocaust scholar Terence de Prez 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, Depress criticized Bettelheim for having supposed that it was correct to have thought that prisoners ever regressed to infantilism.
Depress 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.
DePresse 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 Pres 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 contact with the Allies for a bombing raid on SS parts of the camp.
De Press 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 Press argued, that they did not hate their oppressors and did not sometimes revolt.
According to De Press, 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. Sounds right to me.
Sounds accurate to me. Yeah.
Now, Bettelheim responds with an article in The New Yorker arguing that Depress' 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? Which is bad.
And it's also a great manipulation tactic, right? 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. 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. It becomes dangerous for you to be involved in their life.
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. Absolutely.
Right. In 1985, Bruno's wife Trudy passed on.
Despite some early infidelities, he was by all accounts dedicated to this 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 13, 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 society. And so 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 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 who 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 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, 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 their parents were all rich as hell. Maybe that had more to do with it.
I don't know. Not to take anything away from them, but I just don't know that I give that to Bruno.
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

no god no

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 was in constant turmoil

since his childhood

and so

the outcome is not

so shocking to me

Thank you. think he was in constant turmoil since his childhood.
And so the outcome is not so shocking to me. Nope, nope, not at all.
Well, that's the story. How we feel it.
Oh, I guess I'll do my annoying mental health advocacy thing of saying I veer away from using the term committed suicide because it implies that it's a crime. That's a good point.
Yeah. So I prefer like the language of died by suicide.
Sure. But, you know, who would I be if I'm not someone to say that? you know and honestly like uh it's interesting because i 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 like um yeah it's just so normalized yeah interesting yeah no i think that's a good point yeah 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 um 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 okay well even 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, okay, well, even if I still don't get it, I'll make the change.
But that the freight 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. Yeah, no, no, I think that makes a lot of sense.
And yeah, it's like the most understandable thing about his whole story. There's so many choices that he makes that it's like, well, I don't really get where that comes from.
It's interesting that the first thing he gets criticized for is that and not anything about how he treated children or whatever yeah it's i i it just feels like a very like um 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 i feel like we're on a cusp of like uh of really not having made the progress that we think we have made in psychology and in like wellness culture um and so it's like a reminder to be like very vigilant about like falling for these these people who have such extreme takes and claim to have the only way to handle things and are very victim blaming and, you know, separate separate people as a means of control, especially now. Like we are heading into a whole new golden era for for that.
Anyway, you got any anything you want to plug kind of at the end here? Well, we have to keep going.

So if you're in the mood 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 auto fiction 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 sub stack 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. 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.
And how, and how long it took for society to catch up to the lies. Jeez.
Like half a century, literally almost half a century. Yeah.
Even though, even though the people he was talking about were saying this is wrong while it was happening yeah and that wasn't enough yeah um all right well that's the episode everybody uh thank you so much and thank you allison uh all right have a good week behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
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