Over the Transom: Bettelheim’s Living and Dying, (Rodopi Publishers, Amsterdam & New York, 2008) Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, No. 8.David James Fisher, Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, 2008. Reviewed by Barry Gale, PHD
If you could only find a transom nowadays. Here is a review and a book that came flying over ours. IP.net readers know Fisher from his scholarly, yet readable pieces on French psychoanalysis and other subjects. Gale is Darwin scholar. Fisher’s book is an unusual portrait of both Bettelheim and Ekstein, two Viennese exiles who found and built intellectual homes in American, a land to which both were grateful. Rudy Ekstein, on a peregrination through Chicago, wearing frilly-sleeved tuxedo shirt and a sports jacket described himself as “Rudy Appleseed,” sowing ideas in the American landscape. Those of us at the Orthogenic School, where Ekstein would consult, referred to him as Dr. Charm and to our Dr. B. as Dr. Anti-Charm. Yet, we knew that both spoke truth to power and spoke in profoundly simple English (their adopted language) about psychoanalysis.
Here is Gale’s review.
N. Szajnberg, MD, Managing Editor
Fisher’s Bettelheim: Living and Dying, a meditation on living as well as dying, is filled with intelligence, deep insight and a tender love for both Rudy Ekstein and Bruno Bettelheim without being hagiographic. Fisher’s writing takes a certain self-confidence and maturity to be able to express affection that is both critical and admiring; he does this with enviable ease. The writing is both elegant and elegiac.
The Bettelheim he describes is pretty much as I remember him when I was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1970’s. He didn’t lead a class, he attacked it, employing a Socratic method tipped with a Samurai’s sword. Yet, I never felt he wanted to harm; rather, he wanted people to think and to argue with him. Those who did found him great fun.
I was impressed with Fisher’s defense of Bettelheim’s post-mortem attackers; these critics are Zombies, trying to rouse the dead just to be able to attack them; or perhaps waiting for the living to die so that they can attack more safely. Bettelheim was not perfect, but he was no ogre. I couldn’t wait to go to his class, or see him in our biweekly private sessions. They were the highlights of my week.
I’d like to offer some comments, anecdotes.
–Bettelheim never gave grades in class. It was only pass/fail. Pass if you showed up; fail if you didn’t. (But he didn’t announce that until after the final essay exam.)
–I sat in the back of Bettelheim’s large class on psychoanalysis, though I participated actively in the discussions. I remember once when I caught Bettelheim in an apparent contradiction he immediately attacked me, saying, “I know why you sit in the back there, you actually hate your brother.” (In fact, this was true). Then, a women in the front of the class (the wife of the Rockefeller Chapel minister) stood up, and screamed at Bettelheim, “How dare you attack that boy that way!”: Bettelheim smiled, looked at me, then at her and said, “I attack him because I really like him.”
–In Bettelheim’s large class he devoted one of the periods to an explanation of the Oedipus Complex. At the end, the audience stood and applauded. I had never seen that before. I have never seen it since. He was brilliant.
–There was a mural on the wall in the parlor of the Orthogenic School where Bettelheim held his small seminar on psychoanalysis; it was a painting of someone on the outside looking in at the Orthogenic School. I asked Bettelheim about it. He said he wanted to give the patients there a sense that not only were they in the school but that they could also be outside it, looking in. And that was what freedom was all about.
–I noticed that Bettelheim was always more abrasive in large settings. Most abrasive in the large class, less so in the small seminar, not very abrasive at all in one-on-one meetings. I think he liked the “show business” aspect associated with large groups and in those settings wanted to show up as the “nasty” Bettelheim, to meet peoples’ expectations.
–Bettelheim’s suicide reminds me a bit of how Freud went. Freud had an agreement with his physician that when the pain got too great, that was when he wanted out. It was a rational decision. Bettelheim did it himself, without the help of an attending physician.
Barry G. Gale, Ph.D., Founder and President of Gale International, LLC, an international science and technology consulting firm. He was Professorial Lecturer, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Gale’s major study of Darwin, Evolution Without Evidence: Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species was published in 1982 (University of New Mexico Press in the US; the Harvester Press in the UK).