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Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist
2025/2/25
Behind the Bastards
A
Allison Raskin
R
Robert Evans
Robert Evans: 我将与Allison Raskin进行一场关于布鲁诺·贝特海姆的深入探讨。他是一位经历过集中营的奥地利犹太人，自称是儿童精神病学和自闭症治疗专家，但实际上他的治疗方法存在严重问题，主要手段是对儿童进行殴打。他的诊断标准与现代标准存在差异，经常误诊，其中包含许多种族主义因素。他关于家族背景的许多说法都是虚假的。他的母亲拒绝母乳喂养他，这对他产生了影响，并导致他日后对母亲产生负面看法。他的父亲是一位宽容的父亲，这与典型的奥地利父亲形象不同。他童年时期经历了严重的的反犹太主义，经常遭受同学的欺凌和恐吓，甚至和同学们一起殴打了一位被认为过于女性化的老师。他成年后对男性不符合男性气质的看法与他经历的反犹太主义有关。他父亲患梅毒，这严重影响了家庭关系。他早年对精神分析的看法受到嫉妒心的影响。他父亲死于梅毒并发症。他的妻子在结婚前曾堕胎以避免嫁给他。在奥地利被纳粹吞并后，他没有立即加入犹太地下组织，而是试图以最有利的方式处理其家族企业的“雅利安化”问题。他关于其在纳粹时期参与抵抗运动的说法是虚假的，他的妻子和继女得以逃脱，是由于继女的生母与美国国务卿的关系。他被捕入狱，在达豪和布痕瓦尔德集中营度过了大约11个月的时间。他关于其在集中营中经历的一些说法与其他幸存者的证词不符。他是第一批对集中营生活进行学术研究的人之一，但他著作中将集中营对犹太人的成功归因于犹太人的内在弱点，而非纳粹的酷刑，并认为自己是唯一能够客观分析集中营事件的幸存者，这些说法都存在严重问题。他关于其在集中营中与大量囚犯接触的说法是虚假的。他著作中对犹太人的行为进行谴责，其著作并非旨在揭示大屠杀的真相，而是为了将自己与其他受难的犹太人区分开来。他集中营中的主要目标是保护自己的自我形象。他对“完全机构”的概念着迷，并试图将其应用于儿童发展领域。
Allison Raskin: 我同意Robert Evans的观点，贝特海姆的治疗方法实际上是对儿童的虐待，他认为可以通过创造一个“完全机构”来改变儿童的行为问题。
Allison Raskin: 我同意Robert Evans的观点，贝特海姆的治疗方法实际上是对儿童的虐待，他认为可以通过创造一个“完全机构”来改变儿童的行为问题。
supporting_evidences
Robert Evans: 'Yeah, he would have described himself as, and was usually described as, an expert in child psychiatry and the treatment of autism. Oh, no. Now, here's the thing. Number one, absolutely not in any like legitimate way, an expert in child psychiatry and also not at all an expert in the treatment of autism.'
Robert Evans: 'His primary thing was to declare kids to have autism and then go treat them in a way that we would just describe as hitting them primarily. That's the way this guy worked.'
Robert Evans: 'So it's just a history of misdiagnosing children and also a lot of racism when it comes to misdiagnosing children. Oh, and a lot of racism in the Bruno Bettelheim story.'
Robert Evans: 'And he would later claim because he like makes a lot of statements about his background, again, almost none of which are true, that his paternal grandfather had been an orphan who had been raised and educated as a rabbi. And like he got the attention of the Baron Rothschild who made him a tutor to his heirs. And he was so good at teaching these kids that they gave him command of the family bank. And he like made the family fortune doing that. Definitely not true. Almost certainly is not what happened.'
Robert Evans: 'As is customary for the rich in this period of time, Brito's mother refused to nurse him. He suckled from a professional wet nurse for the first three years of his life and later wrote that his mom was too much the Victorian lady to do it herself. This is, again, super normal at the time, although it also seems to have kind of messed with Bruno because he's never cool with his mom. And he will later project a lot of his issues with her onto mothers in general.'
Robert Evans: 'Now, this is noteworthy, the fact that he has these kind of two different attitudes about his mom, because as his biographer Richard Pollack notes, no prominent psychotherapist of his time was as antagonistic to mothers. And that is saying something.'
Robert Evans: 'Germanic fathers are known as being stern and strict, often like well past what we would describe as abusive. What's weird about Anton is that like even today we would call him kind of a permissive dad. Like we would say today, like this guy could have maybe could have stood to be a little bit more like strict with his kids, which is very rare for an Austrian father.'
Robert Evans: 'Bruno would later describe most of his fellow classmates as anti-Semitic bastards, which is almost certainly accurate.'
Robert Evans: 'So you really can't win, you know? No. One of the key moments of Bruno's education came when he and several other boys attacked one of their school teachers.'
Robert Evans: 'So weak and inadequate was the schoolmaster that one day Bruno egged on several of his classmates and together they bodily removed the offending instructor from the room.'
Robert Evans: 'So Bruno is really, really sensitive about the idea of men not behaving in a masculine way because of the racism that he encounters.'
Robert Evans: 'Now, the likely reason Anton catches syphilis is that his wife goes away one weekend and he sleeps with a sex worker.'
Robert Evans: 'As a teen, Bruno found himself in the Jung-Wandervogel movement, which is a, it's basically a hiking movement.'
Robert Evans: 'And it is through this at age 13 that he first pursues a woman. But he is – this doesn't go well for him. He gets upstaged in his biographer's words by an older boy, Otto Finischel, who was a budding psychoanalyst and a few years older than him and was already attending Freud's lectures at the University of Vienna.'
Robert Evans: 'Anton Bettelheim dies in April of 1926 from a variety of illnesses and ailments that are all tied to his syphilis.'
Robert Evans: 'In near the end of the decade, she gets pregnant. She gets an abortion to avoid marrying Bruno.'
Robert Evans: 'While he focused on what had become a dream, Austria slipped towards a nightmare.'
Robert Evans: 'Now, he definitely is sent to Dachau, but there's no evidence that he is a part of the resistance.'
Robert Evans: 'At any rate, Gina and Patsy only escape because Gina's biological mother...is friends with the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and pulls strings for them.'
Robert Evans: 'And Bruno is attempting to handle this manner in the most financially advantageous way so that he can get his family out.'
Robert Evans: 'And while it is an awful place, I need to emphasize it's not a death camp.'
Robert Evans: 'Bruno survives in part because he gets an indoor job mending socks.'
Robert Evans: 'What's odd is that Bruno is going to tell some stories that definitely aren't true later.'
Robert Evans: 'This is like the first influential publication about life in a camp.'
Robert Evans: 'He attributed the success of camp tactics and traumatizing Jews not to Nazi torture, but to inherent Jewish weakness.'
Robert Evans: 'Now, he would later claim...he was the unique inmate who was able to objectively analyze what was happening in'
Robert Evans: 'Given his sock mending assignment, the first claim seems unlikely. The second is untrue.'
Robert Evans: 'And he's also going to – he does a lot of victim blaming.'
Robert Evans: 'And much of his writing on the matter seems to exist not to reveal truths about the Holocaust, but to separate himself as an individual from the mass of Jews who suffered and were annihilated.'
Robert Evans: 'Bruno even admitted later that the...main problem for him during his time incarcerated was to safeguard his ego.'
Robert Evans: 'And he starts to wonder...What if you made a good concentration camp?'
Allison Raskin: 'And again, he is not treating kids with autism, almost exclusively not.'
Allison Raskin: 'And that is absolutely like the tactic he is going to take.'
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