Click Here To Read: Introduction to Bettelheim: Living and Dying by David James Fisher
Click Here to Read: The Suicide of a Survivor: Some Intimate Perceptions of Bettleheim’s Suicide” Chapter Eight of Bettelheim: Living and Dying by David James Fisher
David James Fisher, Bettelheim: Living and Dying (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2008), 190 pages, Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies.
Bruno Bettelheim
“David James Fisher is that unusual breed of psychoanalyst who is also a historian, cultural theorist, and learned intellectual. In Bettelheim: Living and Dying, he provides a synoptic yet exacting account of the life and work of Bruno Bettelheim. Having known Bettelheim personally, Fisher has an absolute gift for illuminating the perplexities, character traits, and internal conflicts of a man both revered and vilified, and like a good novelist, draws the reader in with absorbing clarity. In analyzing Bettelheim’s contributions and controversies, he offers novel and intimate observati ons on Bettelheim’s personal struggles and anguish. Of special interest is how Bettelheim mentioned the possibility of suicide to Dr. Fisher the last time they met before he took his own life. Here Fisher provides a very humanistic portrayal of a brilliant iconoclast with all the character flaws and creative energies that define his place in psychoanalytic history. Fisher treats his subject matter with sensitive but brutal honesty, examining Bettelheim’s paradoxical contradictions in professional and personal demeanor, private agonies, life at the Orthogenic School, his friendship with Rudolf Ekstein, his ambivalence about his Jewishness, and guilt and shame over surviving two Nazi encampments during the Holocaust. What emerges is a holistic appraisal of a troubled genius whom was at once an intellectual celebrity, maverick clinician, and traumatized depressive who had a divided self. This book is a significant contribution to the field and is bound to be one of the leading psychobiographies on Bettelheim that has ever been written.”
Jon Mills, Editor, Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies
“These sparkling personal essays on Bettelheim, a pathbreaker of modern ego psychology, who has been savagely attacked and deprecated since his death seventeen years ago, restore, the man and his work in historical, clinical, and human context for the contemporary clinician and informed reader. Fisher has done a splendid job of bringing this complex, fascinating figure to life.”
Peter J. Loewenberg, Ph.D., Professor of History and Political Psychology, University of California at Los Angeles, Former Director of Education, New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.
“David James Fisher has written a moving, personal portrait of Bruno Bettelheim as thinker, writer, and friend. His story of Bettelheim during the last two years of his life makes for riveting reading, as does his balanced view of both Bettelheim’s personality and his many contributions to psychoanalysis and the treatment of disturbed children. Fisher’s work is a valuable volume in the history of psychoanalysis in America, and a wonderful narrative about this enormously complex man.”
Joseph Reppen, Ph.D., Editor, Psychoanalytic Psychology and Chair, Council of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals
“A Self ]declared ‘critical admirer’ and final confidant of Bruno Bettelheim, David James Fisher succeeds with as balanced and nuanced as seems possible of the character, the lifetime contributions, and the final justifications of a most controversial psychoanalytic eminence. Bettelheim was at once the center of major professional polemics, and at the same time, the psychoanalyst who, after Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, has had the greatest impact on the wider culture of the twentieth century. Fisher’s book is highly recommended reading for all concerned with the interplay of ideas and personas in the evolving history of the psychoanalytic place in the scheme of human development.”
Robert W. Wallerstein, M.D., Emeritus Professor and Former chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
About the Author:
David James Fisher, Ph.D. is Clinical Instructor, Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine, Senior Faculty member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Dr. Fisher serves on the Robert Stoller Foundation Board and is a member of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. He has worked as an Associate Editor for North America for The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on the advisory board of Society, and as an editor of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin. He did his doctoral work in European cultural and intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of George L. Mosse and post ]doctoral work in Paris at the Sixieme section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes under the direction of Georges Haupt. He was analyzed by Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D. Dr. Fisher has published three previous books, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (University of California Press, l988; Transaction Publishers, 2004); Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (Transaction Publishers, 1991); and Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul: Essays on Bettelheim (in German, Psycho ]Sozial Verlag, 2003). In addition, Dr. Fisher has authored over fifty journal articles and book reviews on contemporary French cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis, including essays on Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, Fenichel, and Spielrein.
He is currently working on an essay on Camus and the psychology of the absurd and the Sisyphus complex; a clinical and theoretical exploration of the psychology of lying in intimate relationships as a disturbance of the self, co ]authored with Joseph Natterson; and a clinical exploration of erotic counter ] transference in the paper “Stoller, Erotics, Sexual Excitement.” He has recently published an essay on the politics of the free clinic movement called “Classical Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Social Engagement in the Era Between the Wars: Reflections on the Free Clinics,” published in Psychoanalysis and History, 2007 and in an abridged form in Jewish Currents in 2008. Dr. Fisher is well regarded as a speaker and has lectured extensively, including in France, Canada, and Great Britain, as well as a number of prominent American universities, including the California Institute of Technology, M.I.T., and Brandeis.
He practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Los Angeles. Address for correspondence: David James Fisher, Ph.D., 9911 W. Pico Blvd., Suite 1280, Los Angeles, CA 90035,
U.S.A. [email: djamesfisher@aol.com]