Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist
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Call zone media. Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and I am again alone without my producer Sophie Lichterman today. She is recovering from a health thingamajig, and we all wish her the best. She will be back soon. But you know who's not back soon, because they're here today, Allison Raskin. Allison, welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you for being on. You and I are going to have a long conversation about a very weird dude today. But before we get into that, we should talk a little bit about you. You are a writer, director, comedian. You are the co-author of the book, I Hate Everyone But You, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yeah, is there anything else you want to kind of plug up at the top here?

Oh, yes. That feels like an outdated bio a little bit.

I do a lot of different stuff. These days, I primarily promote myself as a writer still and then a relationship coach and mental health advocate. So I've had two nonfiction books come out about sort of the intersection of mental health and relationships. And then I have a rom-com novel coming out in April called Save the Date, which is loosely based off of –

a multiverse version of my, my own broken engagement. So a fictionalized version of what could have happened afterwards. Well, that is very appropriate, uh, that you work in mental health because the guy we're talking about today is one of the worst things that ever happened to the mental health field. Um, in the entire, he is really bad at that.

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Amica. Empathy is our best policy.

We are talking about a fellow named Bruno Bettelheim. Have you heard of Bruno Bettelheim? No, I don't. I actually do have a master's in psychology, but he did not come up along that journey. 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. 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. There's a lot more to him than that. Even he was a very, very strange man. It's kind of important that you note at the outset that when we talk about

Again, the kids that he was working with were described as having autism and schizophrenia today. Most of them we would just describe as kids with like mild behavioral problems, like twitching a little bit in class or something or not being good at doing math, right? These were not terms that meant the same thing that they do today because diagnostic criteria in the early 1900s was just not what it is now.

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. I'm sure there is. Yeah, both as a as a victim and as a perpetrator, because Bruno came. He's an Austrian, like most of the really fascinating, like early 20th century mental health professionals.

And his family, he came from this like wealthy subset of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish population. That's like his family comes from money and comes from money within like the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Jewish population, which is like a whole separate subset of like the imperial population.

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. That said, the actual real story of his family name is a lot cooler. And I don't know why he tells this bullshit story about like him being a banker because the name Bettelheim came from sometime in the 1700s. This Slovakian nobleman named Count Bethlen fell for the wife of a Jewish citizen and tried to kidnap her on his horse. And her husband charged in and beat the count in hand to hand combat.

And given like the racial politics at the time, this was a ballsy move, right? For this guy to come in and just like wail on a major member of the nobility. And so he got the nickname Bethlehem from the guy he beat up Judah, which is like, you know, Jewish, right? And that was like where the name Bettelheim came from. After a few decades later, the Habsburgs decreed everyone had to have a last name. And so that became Bettelheim for reasons I'm not that.

That don't entirely make sense to me, but it's a pretty cool origin story. Yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, beating the hell out of a count. Like a guy on horseback, too, which is like...

You got to really have some. It sounds like a tall Jew, which is exciting in and of itself. It sounds like a big guy. I should disclaim here that I am Jewish. So that's where probably where the name Bettelheim comes, like any sort of this is a mid 1700s family last name origin story. Maybe none of this is true. Right.

We'll never really know. Whatever the case, Bruno's father and grandfather kind of make their fortune trading wood. That's where the family money comes from, right? They like own forests that they plant and chop down and they're in just kind of like the wood products business, you know, and they do very well as a result of that. They're

So Bruno's dad, Anton, starts a lumber business in 1907 with another guy. And Anton and Paula Bettelheim, Bruno's parents, they first have a daughter, Margaret, in 1899. And then on August 28th, 1903, they welcome Bruno into the world.

By this point, Anton's lumber business was doing very well and the family was probably maybe not in the top 1% because this is an empire and they're not in the nobility, but not super far from the top 1%. They're very wealthy. 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. Yes, that is also a common theme in early psychology. Early psychology. Yeah, exactly. Especially for Austrians. Maybe a whole deal going on there.

Yeah. Now, again, it's kind of he's going to later talk a lot about his mother being cold and like not a very kindly person. But in other writings from like while he's a young man, he'll describe her as loving and attentive. And again, he's a guy who makes up a lot of stories about the past. So I don't know if.

His mom was actually cold to him when he was a kid or if something happened later that made him kind of retroactively decide that. But it's very different from how like other people who knew them when he was a little kid described their relationship to. We'll never know. Like most boys in the late Victorian era, he had several brushes with death. He like he has this classic thing where he eats poison berries. Right.

Oh, no. And this doctor just gives him a shitload of coffee to fix it. I think the idea is that like we just need to have him pee all of this out. Right. Old time in medicine. So wait. So other people thought that his mother was loving. Yes. Was that. OK, got it. Got it. Yes. And he he will describe at varying points, very different kinds of relationships with his mom.

As a young man, he writes that, quote, while he was sick, my mother sat at my bedside, sponging my feverish body and changing the cold compresses to give me relief. In moments like these, I learned to understand and appreciate that a mother makes all the difference in the world when one is in need, in great pain, deeply worried or even desperate.

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. Yes, truly.

Wow. He's beating out Freud. He's beating Freud in the issues with mom game. Yes. Yeah. That's, that's like dunking on Jordan. So again, there's not really a clear explanation forthcoming as to this. Bruno does recall later being raised as an older boy by his aunt, as much as his mother and often hiding at her place to avoid his sister, Margaret, who he described as a busybody. Um,

This is all pretty normal kid stuff, you know. At any rate, the overwhelming recollections of the people who knew Bruno and his family was that his parents were doting and involved. And if anything, his mother may have smothered him a bit.

His father, Anton, was a peculiar man for the era. 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.

One anecdote Bruno later gave was that he got in trouble for cursing in front of his mother and she like went to it. She was like, Anton, your son just, you know, cursed in front of me. And her father, his father became upset, not that Bruno had cursed, but that he now had to punish his son. And he even asks Bruno, do I really have to punish you to get you to stop cursing in front of your mother?

Which, you know, the norm would have been probably to smack him, right? Like just based on sort of the standards of the time. Bruno's education is fairly strict, but that's normal for his social class and the era. He attends the finest school in Vienna, and he was an excellent student, one of five out of 54 in his year to be noted as having been excellent.

He spent the war years, World War I, that is, in school, which is another mark of his good luck. You know, he's born in this sweet spot where he doesn't have to go die on the Italian border or in Serbia or in Russia, all of which were like beloved pastimes of Austrian teenage boys in these years. Yeah.

And he's just like, my mom's too nice. My mom was too nice to me. My dad let me get away with stuff. Just daydreaming about charging a machine gun nest. He's not a super militant kid, but he does get very lucky, right? Now, the war years are difficult even for the rich. Bruno is better off than most of the populace. He and his family are never in danger of starving to death.

But they do go hungry. Everybody does. Right. With the very with the exception of like the top of the royal family, everybody in Austria is going hungry at least a little bit during the war years. It's just a terrible time. Right. This the war is bad for his family fortunes. Huge tracts of their Bettelheim land get lit like burnt down by artillery bombardment right at the start of hostilities. Right.

But his family doesn't lose everything. And Anton seems to have been an unusually tenacious and brilliant businessman. By the time the war ended and the Habsburg Empire with it, the Bettelheims were still comfortably wealthy. Right. Which is takes a lot. That's not easy to maintain in this period of time. So it says a lot about Anton. This guy seems great. The dad seems awesome. He seems like a pretty good dad for the era. About as good as you could hope for.

Bruno's schooling was mixed as a – again, he is not going to – he's going to an integrated school, which in itself in Austria is a pretty new thing that like you would have Jewish and Christian boys at the same school. There were some – like you have religious education as part of your normal schooling. Obviously, the small number of Jewish kids have a rabbi. Most of the other boys are being talked to by like members of the Catholic clergy because it's a majority Catholic country. Right.

Bruno would later describe most of his fellow classmates as anti-Semitic bastards, which is almost certainly accurate. That will get him. Austria in the 19th. Probably on the money. Probably kinds of racism that you would need like a NASA calculator to rate today. Yeah.

He recalled often the case of a classmate who he had considered a friend and walked to school with daily who out of nowhere one morning punched him in the face in revenge for the crucifixion of Christ. So that kind of racism. Yeah. Your best friend just hits you one day because of something that happened 2000 years ago.

But it does like bring up this thing that I think is happening now where like these kids, kids will just be friends with kids, but then they go home and their parents tell them things. And then suddenly they're acting out and they're deciding this is someone who needs to be punched in the face. I guess I need to be a huge asshole now. Okay. He learned, he learned that somewhere that day before. Right. Yeah. That kid didn't come up with the idea on his own. It was a parent or like probably a member of the Catholic clergy who was talking shit one day. Hmm.

Now, this was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the racism that Bruno endured as a kid. He would later say, quote, there were the boys who extorted money, who beat us if we handed it over because we were dirty cowards and who beat us if we didn't because we were miserly Jews. 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. Again, very different era who he described later as a simpering fool who spoke with the voice of a eunuch. Right. In other words, he and a bunch of his other students beat the hell out of a school teacher because he was effeminate.

You know, in the creation of Dr. B, a biography by Richard Pollack, Pollack writes, 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. Bettelheim recalled that he immediately began to tremble as he contemplated the consequences of this rash act. And indeed, the next day, the school's authoritarian director castigated the class and especially Bruno as the leader in this unprecedented and nefarious deed.

But the director did not, as the troublemaker feared, expel him. On the contrary, at the end of the scolding, his demeanor suddenly softened, and in a quiet voice, he said, Of course I know that if Dr. X had behaved as I expect all masters of this institution to behave, nothing like this could have happened.

So again, he like beats up a teacher. He like leads a mob to force a teacher violently out of the classroom. And the director's like, well, yeah, but he shouldn't have been such a girl about it. Yeah, he was asking for it. He was asking for it. And then we wonder like, oh, how did this guy then go on to perpetuate harm for decades? Yeah. Yeah. Why was this guy a problem later in life? Yeah.

Well, and it's also why did Austria get involved in so much fucked up shit? You know, it really like the fact that this is the country that is going to like produce Hitler and that just like gets does the things it does in World War One. It's like, oh, yeah, everybody was like,

Like this, this is a culture that's kind of out of its mind in a lot of ways, you know, I can't relate to living in one of those. No, no, no, no, no. Thank God we figured fixed all of our mental health issues. Finally, human beings are healthy. I haven't read the news in about eight years, but it's going well. Yeah.

So, more than two-thirds of a century later, Bruno would recall this incident as key in his development as an educator because it was the first time a figure of authority at his school had witnessed bad behavior and, in his eyes, sought to understand its root cause rather than just punishing it outright. So, what he takes from this is,

My headmaster punished me because he does get punished, but he like sought to understand why I had acted out. And this is like a revelation to him that you wouldn't just hit a kid for not doing what you wanted a kid to do. You would try to understand what was the child thinking when it behaved – when they behaved badly, right? And then you hit them. And then you hit them. And then you hit them. Yeah.

Now, the fact that Bruno just chose to describe the teacher he disliked as sounding like a eunuch holds a little more meaning than you might guess. As an adult, Bruno reserved special disgust for the authority figures of his childhood who acted in ways he considered effeminate. And his kind and retiring father was one of these. In an excellent paper on Bettelheim for Disability Studies Quarterly, Griffin Epstein seems to tie this behavior to Bruno's insecurity over anti-Semitism.

There was a strong hetero-patriarchal thrust to the stigmatization of Jews. According to Boyarin, Jews were understood to defy Western European gender and sexual norms. Jewish men were seen as effeminate sissies, unfit for labor, while Jewish women, when they appeared discursively at all, were read as phallic monsters. Jews were perceived broadly as deviant, perverse, and inbred sexual aberrations.

So Bruno is really, really sensitive about the idea of men not behaving in a masculine way because of the racism that he encounters. Right. And this is further complicated by the fact that his dad catches syphilis in 1907. So this this idea and another anti anti-Semites will often like link.

syphilis to Judaism in this period. It is a common aspect of racial politics. Hitler does it a lot. And so the fact that Bruno's dad, as kind as he is, catches this very shameful disease is a big part of why Bruno is going to be the way he is as an adult. And it's like this kind of shame that is at the core of his personality as a kid.

Now, the likely reason Anton catches syphilis is that his wife goes away one weekend and he sleeps with a sex worker, right? That's generally how this thing happened. This was apparently the only time he did it, although obviously we can't know that. But the indiscretion has a shattering impact on the family. His wife doesn't sleep with him for the last 20 years of their marriage.

And she doesn't because she would get sick and die if she did. Right. Like this is an uncurable fatal illness in addition to being a stigmatized illness. So we live for 20 years with syphilis. You do. You often it takes about 20, 15 to 20 years to hit like the tertiary stages. Like that's not it can it can go differently. But like one of the frightening things about syphilis is that.

You after the quote unquote indiscretion, as it would be, you know, so you have a break in your and you and you have an unrecommended liaison. You don't know for years if you got sick from it. Right. And that's part of why this is such a massive thing in Austrian culture and all in all European culture in this period is that like the entire.

All the men in the society are constantly scared of getting syphilis, right? And so are their wives because if your husband is sleeping around and he catches it, you'll get it. One of the movies that shaped me so much as a kid was this –

This movie called She's Too Young on Lifetime. Oh, God. That was about a syphilis outbreak at a high school. Oh, my God. Look, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Not that syphilis is funny, but Lifetime's execution of the hit film She's Too Young. A Lifetime movie about syphilis at a high school does sound pretty rad.

But also like it's funny because at that point you just get a shot like it's not the same stakes as it was for them, you know? Yeah. No, and it's going to be a big deal until 1943, right? Like so it is like well – like Bruno is a mature adult in like his 30s by the time it stops being something that people are terrified of. But you know what isn't syphilis?

is the sponsor of this podcast, not sponsored by Syphilis. That was a really good transition. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people praise the transitions on this show. Not our sponsors, notably.

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And we're back. I wonder, like, you could probably rebrand. Given like RFK's position in our society, you could probably rebrand syphilis as a health tonic, right? Oh, yeah.

And sort of a way to separate the weak from the chaff, like who can maintain syphilis for as long as possible. That's right. You've got all these like Joe Rogan guys who really like taking ayahuasca. Syphilis causes hallucinations. I feel like there's like a possibility here to make this work. And it's sad that that's probably more true than we think it is. We're like six months out from this. Yeah.

So the fact that Bruno's dad catches syphilis is going to deepen the rift that he has with him. And Bruno will later claim that he had, quote, no suitable masculine figures in his life as a child. In their paper, Griffin Epstein suggests that Bruno saw his father's sickness and Jewishness as a threat to his desire to assimilate to Austrian culture. Bruno is and this is not an uncommon thing at the time.

an assimilationist, right? Like he does not – he's not particularly religious. He does not feel a strong separate identity as a Jew in Austria. He wants to be seen as Austrian, you know? Yeah, which is understandable given the environment he grew up in. Of course. It's the most normal thing in the world given his childhood. Yeah.

As a teen, Bruno found himself in the Jung-Wandervogel movement, which is a, it's basically a hiking movement. This whole idea that, you know, what's healthy is moving your body out in nature. Very new and exciting at the time.

And so this is like a young, it's a quasi socialist movement. And one of the things that's kind of noteworthy is they do a lot of co-ed hiking, right? So men and women are like moving, exercising outdoors together, you know? So there's both this degree of like, this is kind of a cutting edge social. This is like going to raves, you know, was when I was a kid, when you and I were like, like 20 something. Yeah, this is wild stuff. Yeah, wild stuff. We're going to go hike. Yeah.

you know, we might all camp together. Um,

Hey, overnight. That is pretty risque. That is risque. 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. And obviously this woman that Bruno is interested in – well, not woman. She's 13. But they're all kids. Yeah.

This kid that he is interested in is like attracted to the fact that this older boy is going to college and listening to the great Freud's lectures. And Bruno initially develops a hatred of psychoanalysis because he's so jealous of this, this older boy, which Polak writes was quote, so great. He could not sleep. He's just so angry about psychoanalysis, furious about the idea of Freud. Yeah.

Look, I'm not the hugest fan of pure psychoanalysis, but at least it doesn't keep me up at night. I'm so pissed that people are getting therapy just reading Freud's book on cocaine and fuming. So eventually he does settle upon a method for winning the girl's heart. He would study Freud's work obsessively in order to upstage this younger boy.

This sparked what would become a lifetime obsession. He changes his mind on psychoanalysis. He does not win this girl's heart. And in fact, she grows exhausted because he in order to impress her, he spends like a whole weekend talking to her about Freud. And she's like, I'm not interested in Freud anymore. I'm done with this. He ruins Freud for her. He's fucked Freud up for me. Yeah.

Anton Bettelheim dies in April of 1926 from a variety of illnesses and ailments that are all tied to his syphilis, right? The final stages of syphilis literally like it's boring holes through your brain like a shipworm in wood. And it causes like it's pretty unpleasant.

So...

you know, he does get like a real childhood. He gets some time, but at age 23, he is the head of the family. He doesn't really want to do this job. Again, he's very interested in psychoanalysis. He is a student at the University of Vienna focusing on art history at this point, but he takes some business courses and he understands that like,

Like, I need to keep my mom and my sister in the kind of finery that they have become. Right? Like, my family is used to being rich. I have to maintain this state. Maintain. Yes. Yes. That's my job, you know? And he does this. He's a very, like, diligent head of the family. He starts courting a young woman named Regina. Bruno is in love with Regina. And Regina...

Yeah.

You know, some love stories never die. Some love stories never die. So Regina settles for Bruno because he's rich, right? She's like, well, he's not this sexy young artist, but he does have a shitload of money. And I guess that's as good as you can do sometimes. And in the late 20s, it kind of is. Um,

In near the end of the decade, she gets pregnant. She gets an abortion to avoid marrying Bruno, which should give you an idea of kind of where her head is at at the time, considering how much less common that is, you know? Right. And dangerous. Yes. And much more dangerous.

Wow. That's a real sick burn to Bruno. That is kind of a burn to Bruno, right? Yeah, I think so. Like, obviously, I think, like, at the time, he's going to read it that way, right? Because he wants a family with this lady. This feeds into a lifetime insecurity Bruno would express over his looks. He made frequent comments about the fact that his mother had called him ugly on the day he was born and that he never got better looking, which seems unfair to me because I found it

Yeah.

a pretty normal looking guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a standard guy. That's a standard issue Austrian man. Yeah. And you add a bunch of money to his portfolio. He's looking a lot better. He's looking good. No syphilis. You know, he's doing about as good as you could be doing in that period of time. Yeah. This is people's insecurities can really end up

Causing a lot of harm. Yeah. Yeah. And he is, he's super insecure about like his hair and he does kind of, he goes bald after this, um, about his like nose and his ears. Um, and he, he will obsess over this, you know, I'm, I'm bringing it up not to shit on him, but because this is like an important part of his self image. Um,

And his self-image is further harmed by the fact that Regina would vomit most of the time when he visited her, which is not super good for your ego. No, that's really just... She would just puke in his presence? Yeah, she would often puke in his presence. I think she's got like other stuff going on. Okay. She's probably... I think some of it is that she feels stressed out because she has to make a choice, right? Like she knows that...

I've got to make a decision about whether or not to like pick this guy. And that's kind of fucking with her. I don't think she's like disgusted in him. I think it's literally just anxiety, but it, it fucks with his head. Like, obviously that's devastating. Eventually Gina finds herself out of other options and she marries Bruno. Now she will always describe him as a wonderful friend. She genuinely likes him. She's just not into him, you know? Um,

Anyway, they get married in 1930 and during their years because they are courting for what you would call an abnormally long time, although not within their social. Their social circle are like kind of bohemians and artists and intellectuals. So this is not super weird for the people they socialize with. Right.

So Gina starts like kind of nearly right before they get married, taking therapy from a guy called Richard Sterba and his wife, Edith Sterba, who are a husband and wife psychoanalyst couple that are members of Freud's inner circle. These are famous psychoanalysts, right? Within the psychoanalyst community, these are like, you know, they're big names.

Urged on by Edith, Gina convinces her husband to essentially adopt a troubled young girl whose mom had abandoned her. This girl, Patricia, might actually have been someone we would describe as having autism today. That's how she gets described back then. But she has a lot of trouble being social and sort of connecting and making eye contact and whatnot with people. Her mom is this...

Yeah.

I think a lot of people don't want a kid that deviates from what they expect a kid to be. Yes. And then if that kid is different in any way, it's like, well, this isn't what I signed up for. Right, right. Someone else take care of this child. And I will say this kid's mom...

comes through in the clutch later in this story. But at this point, she's like, yeah, would you raise my kid for me? I got to like do stuff. And Regina says like, yeah, she really wants to do this. By all accounts, she's very loving and does like really helps this kid out is a good. And Bruno is like like Patricia will later remember Bruno fondly. He does not really take any part in raising her.

which is interesting because he's later going to be a child development expert, quote unquote. He is just working and making money, but she recalls him as like a nice man and their household as a pleasant place. How old was she when she went to live with them? I think she's like seven or eight, something like that. She's a little girl.

Now, he is working a lot, six days a week providing for the family. And at this time, as kind of the 20s come to an end and the early 30s start, the Nazi movement is winding its way closer to power in Germany. Now, this is not something that is initially of major concern to Bruno or his wife. They are not politically involved. Instead, he becomes obsessed with finishing his college degree so he could start training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.

While he focused on what had become a dream, Austria slipped towards a nightmare. In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power in Germany, a Christian socialist politician named Engelbert Dolfus suspended parliament in Austria and began ruling by decree as a reaction to economic calamity and political dysfunction in Austria's First Republic. Now, Dolfus, again, he's a Christian socialist. This is not a Nazi revolution.

Party, but he is an autocrat, right? He's ruling by decree. He's cracking down on anyone who was like this. And this provides fuel for the Nazis because it's now been normalized this autocratic rule, right? Bettelheim recalled of the chaos at the time. They, the Nazis, released tear gas and department stores to frighten off shoppers, smeared house walls with pro-Hitler graffiti, set off firecrackers and petards in many places to cause panic and eventually started outright bombings.

So the Nazis are an illegal party at this point. They are literally a terrorist party in Austria. But Dollfuss is not really a whole lot better. He is more concerned with using the military to crack down on left-wing militias, which culminates on him using artillery to shell hundreds of apartment buildings in the capital.

He succeeds in destroying the Social Democratic Party and its militia, which had been like the most power, the only militant force in the country that could compete with the Nazis. He destroys them so completely that in June of 1934, when 154 Nazis attack government headquarters, there is no organized left-wing resistance against them, and Dolfus is murdered by the Nazis.

This is reminding me of a headline I just read about how the FBI is not going to be focusing on white supremacists, but instead the BLM movement. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. It's all good. We learn nothing. No, no. I mean, that's the lesson of history is that no one's ever learned a lesson from history. Truly. Yeah.

So Bruno does not react with great concern at first, even though this is a concerning thing, right? He is very much, he's very good at focusing on just what interests him.

Yeah.

He gets a PhD in aesthetics, which is an accomplishment, but that's not a degree in psychoanalytics, right? What is aesthetics? It's like...

Art history and that kind of stuff. It's like art-related shit. He would later lie and claim his degree had been approved personally by a council of Freud's closest confidants, including his daughter Anna, and then add that Sigmund Freud had wandered into the room and said, oh, you know what? A dude with an aesthetics degree is just what psychoanalytics needs to develop as a science. He's such a bad liar. Yeah.

And then Freud walked into the room and was like, you're exactly what my field needs. Art history major. And he wouldn't believe it, but he was smoking a cigar. He was smoking a cigar. Within days of Bettelheim getting his PhD, the Anschluss begins and Germany annexes Austria. We're kind of yada yada-ing a lot.

a lot of that history because that's a story for another day. But this is a major point at which the life story that Bruno will tell later diverges from reality because the claim that he will give years later once he gets to the U.S. is that as soon as the Nazis annex Austria, he joins the Jewish underground. Right.

He becomes an officer in the underground. He stands armed guard at facilities. He's afraid the Nazis are going to destroy. He helps to hide some of the first Jews targeted by the Nazis and spirit them away to safety. He describes himself as a significant figure in the underground army and says that after demobilizing his men, he fled to Czechoslovakia where he was arrested and sent to Dachau.

Now, he definitely is sent to Dachau, but there's no evidence that he is a part of the resistance. Gina, his wife, told Richard Polak this story was nonsense. They're like, no, we were not – like he was not doing that. That's just not what was going on at the time.

And what he was doing was not like like cowardly. He was trying to take care of his family. You know, he urges his wife and daughter to flee ahead of him. And at this point, this is kind of like a selfless gesture. His wife is cheating on him with a married man, and he urges her to leave with that guy and his wife, thinking that they'll have better odds of escaping together.

At any rate, Gina and Patsy only escape because Gina's biological mother, a wealthy New York woman – or not – sorry, Patricia's biological mother, right? Like the woman who had kind of abandoned her kid to this couple is friends with the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and pulls strings for them. And to her credit, this woman – I think Angie is her name – really like it puts in a lot of work to rescue them. She's like, these people saved my kid. I have to get them out of Austria. Right.

So she redeems herself in my eyes there. She really does put in a lot of effort here. People are complicated. People are complicated. Not a great mom, but a good friend. In 1945, Bruno would later swear an affidavit for the Nuremberg war crimes trial in which he discussed the terms of his arrest and stated that he had not participated in resistance activity. This is part of why we know that this is a story he makes up later. Now, the reality is that he witnessed people

pretty titanic racial violence in the wake of Nazi annexation. Jews were beaten and murdered in the streets. A common thing was that they would be forced to clean gutters on their hands and knees, often with like toothbrushes, and then would be beaten by gangs of Nazi thugs. It was a hideous, hideous time.

And Bruno does not leave as soon as he could because he's trying to take care of his mom and his sister. And he's also managing – there's this thing that happens. Once the Nazis take over, Jewish businesses are demanded to be handed over to Aryans. This is a process called Aryanization. It is not a fair process. You get pennies on the dollar based on what your businesses had been worth.

And Bruno is attempting to handle this manner in the most financially advantageous way so that he can get his family out. He can buy their way out of Austria.

He does, however, get arrested and sent to Dachau, which is a very normal thing for Jewish men in Austria. Like during this period of time, a lot of them get sent to the camps. Dachau is the first of like the formal camps, right? Right after Hitler takes power in 33, there's what are called like wild concentration camps, which are like we have occupied some government buildings and we're torturing guys there basically, right? Dachau is kind of like the first of – we have actually like built this camp. Yeah.

And while it is an awful place, I need to emphasize it's not a death camp, right? Those are not operational yet. Over the course of the Third Reich, about 30,000 of the 206,000 or so inmates at Dachau will perish there, right? Which is terrible. That's a nightmarish place, but it's not Auschwitz, right? Those are not operational yet. Going there isn't a death sentence. No. You probably live. Right. Right.

And in fact, prisoners are generally fed enough to survive and are rarely like beaten to death. It is closer to a prison camp than what is going to come later. That said, the nicest stay at a concentration camp is still among the worst things a person can experience.

Bruno and everyone who was sent over with him spends days locked in a train with the heat on full blast and the stifling summer just to fuck with them. They're denied water during the journey. He gets stabbed with a bayonet during the drive.

Um, Jewish prisoners are regularly forced to stand at attention once they arrive in the blazing heat for hours at a time. Bruno sees people executed for attempting to escape. Uh, when inmates would fail to make their beds properly, they would be strung from a tree by their wrists by SS guards and left there for hours. Um,

Like many Austrian Jews, the official reason for Bruno's incarceration was Schutzhaftling Jutta or incarcerated for his own protection, right? He's locked up to keep him safe, right? From –

From us. Okay. From us. From just the general propaganda we've been spewing against that you should kill all Jews. Yeah, yeah. Okay. He is – now this is, again, he's allowed communication with his family. He's able to send letters back and forth. They're able to send him money. He's able to buy food from the commissary. Yeah.

And while this is going on, he's constantly talking with Gina, who is working through her friend through Cordell Hull to try and secure him a visa. So this is the the whole time this is going on. He is in communication with his family who are talking with the U.S. State Department, trying to get him a visa to get him out.

After three months at Dachau, he is transferred to Buchenwald, which is a much worse place. Dachau had had some amenities, sufficient food, and like it has a weirdly good library. None of that is present at Buchenwald. And the guards are on the whole a lot more violent.

Now, Bruno survives in part because he gets an indoor job mending socks, which during the winter stops him from freezing to death as much as everyone else. He gets frostbite that he has to get cut off. Right. Like so he is still freezing a lot of the time, but he doesn't freeze entirely because he has this very rare indoor job. And we don't really know why. Right.

Other inmates at the camp who were friends of his will say that he was somehow protected and that his indoor job was a very, very rare setup. We, again, really have no idea why this is the case. He would later allude to having done things he regretted in order to survive. That is a very normal story. A lot of people did.

Other inmates who knew him theorized that one of the capos or prisoners that were authorized to handle managerial tasks by the SS had a soft spot for him. Another of Bruno's friends said that there was a, quote, very, very nice SS officer who protected Bruno.

And you hear about that stuff. That doesn't mean these are good people, but it means that if you were, if you're interned at one of these camps, you're going to note some of these guys I can like work with. And some of them are just sadists, you know? Um, so maybe Bruno just kind of has one of these guys has a soft spot for him. There's different stories. We don't really know what the case was. Bruno credited foremost his luck, but would later, uh, like give some other stories. Um,

What's odd is that Bruno is going to tell some stories that definitely aren't true later. He's going to claim that he was targeted over the fact that he wore glasses and was beaten as a result of it.

Bruno's fellow inmates who were interviewed, and again, these are guys who were his friends, said that, no, no, no, the guards were like less aggro to the guys with glasses. Again, I don't know who's telling the truth here, but there's two different stories, right? And this is not the only time Bruno is going to sort of stretch truths about his time at the camps, which is probably – and we should probably get to why that matters now.

So Bruno spends eight months at Buchenwald. So he's in camps for a little less than a year, about 11 months. It's like 10 and a half months, something like that. And he is released due to the relentless pleading of his wife and their wealthy benefactor. He gets a visa. There's also kind of a general amnesty around this time for Jews who are willing to leave the Reich immediately. And so he gets out during this period of time.

He makes his way to the United States in short order. He is really eager to retake up his marriage, but the marriage breaks up as soon as he gets to the States, right? Like they spend a night together and it becomes clear this is not going to work out. Yeah.

Obviously, the whole like spending a year in a concentration camp and then your marriage breaking up, pretty stressful. Like probably one of the worst things I can imagine going through. That's some long-term damage. That's going to fuck you up a bit. But he gets an academic job with Rockford College in Illinois. And in 1943, he publishes the earliest influential detailed account of life in a concentration camp.

This is like the first influential publication about life in a camp, right? And it is- That's huge. Yes. It is titled Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. And it is a work of titanic influence. Dwight D. Eisenhower is so impacted by it that it's made required reading for all US military government officials in Europe after the war. This is a big-

Like accomplishment. And that's a problem because he makes some conclusions about what happens to people in concentration camps that are problematic, to say the least. And we're going to we're going to get to that. But I think it's probably time we we transmit to ads one last time.

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So we're back. Bruno has become probably the first academic to establish himself as an expert on the concentration camp system from the inside. And this is an issue because, number one, Bruno doesn't know much about the overall system, and he's going to fib about some of what he sees. And I want to quote from that article by Griffin Epstein again.

He attributed the success of camp tactics and traumatizing Jews not to Nazi torture, but to inherent Jewish weakness. Bettelheim claimed that Jewish prisoners were more likely than others to regress under repression to types of behavior characteristic of infancy or early youth.

because of failings of the Jewish character. He claimed that concentration camps disintegrated the personality of the prisoner. In the final stage of disintegration, Jews would actually become Nazis, changing their personalities so as to accept the various values of the SS. Problematic. Wow.

Problematic. Internalized anti-Semitism will do a number on you. Oh, Bruno, you got fucked up, buddy. No, no. Yikes. Now, he would later claim, and this is what's really problematic to me, is that he was the unique inmate who was able to objectively analyze what was happening in

No one else could do it. They didn't have the strength of mind, right? Only I had the psychoanalytic. Yeah, Viktor Frankl was just... Viktor Frankl didn't know what he was fucking doing. He was...

You know, saving other people's lives. But, you know, he was really a wuss. He is interned with and his friends at Buchenwald and at Dachau are psychoanalysts, prominent ones. Like he's good. He's there with them. Right. And they survive. You know, Pollack continues, quote, he wrote that he asked hundreds of German Jewish prisoners why they had not left Germany rather than submit to the degradation inflicted upon them by the Nazis.

Then he asked more than 100 older political prisoners if they would reveal the horrors of camp life if they were freed and managed to reach safe territory. And that, in collecting data for his psychological observations, he came into personal contact with at least 1,500 prisoners in the two camps. He was able to interact with so many inmates, he said, because he worked in at least 20 different labor details and slept in five different barracks.

Given his sock mending assignment, the first claim seems unlikely. The second is untrue. Prisoners were required to write their block numbers on their correspondence, and Bettelheim marked all his letters from Dachau Block 22 and from Buchenwald Block 17. So again, he makes this claim about, I was at all of these different locations, and so I talked to, and that's why there's academic rigor, because I talked to a representative sample, and we just know that he didn't, right? Because we know where he marks his letters from.

When do people start to get skeptical about what he had said? A lot of the Jewish community is immediately skeptical. People get pissed at this because he's blaming them, right? But it's like kind of modern Holocaust scholarship really starts to come after. And we'll talk about this some in part two. And I think the 70s is when that becomes much more common. Yeah.

But this is this essay and Bruno because Bruno writes other things about the Holocaust. He is the primary like source for the movie Sophie's Choice.

Really? Yes. Yes. And one of the things that's really problematic about that is Sophie's choice is about a death camp and Bruno doesn't know anything about the death camps. And he's very much generalizing his experience in this period of time about it to a later period of time in a way that transmits a lot of inaccuracies down as a result because – I've never seen Sophie's choice. Is it worth it? I don't know how to answer that question. Yeah.

It's not my – I think the Holocaust movie that I find like most intellectually interesting is this old Soviet era one called The Shop on Main Street that is about the – like a village that gets taken by the Nazis and the Aryanization process. But I don't know. Like that's such a – yeah. I –

I feel like I prefer to get my examination of, like, fascism through sci-fi. There you go. It's too upsetting to watch a thing that is actually about the Holocaust. Yeah. Whereas, like, the lessons and the morals and, like, the psychological dilemmas and stuff, I'd rather, like, see through the frame of, like, aliens. The Cardassians, yes. It's much easier to digest the Nazis through Cardassia, yeah. Um...

So very little complaint is made initially about the time that all of these sources go unnamed. He'll just say, oh, believe me, because all these guys said this, right? I'm not going to tell you who they were, even though, again, there's a lot of other people who survive. And his analysis of how camp inmates react to their situations is

One of the things people will point out is that rather than comporting with other accounts from inside the camps, his analysis of how people behave and why comports with Freudian psychiatry, right? And that's worth noting. In a critical article about Bettelheim for Psychohistory Review, Paul Rosen writes,

It is still memorable and shocking how Bettelheim in his 1943 article thought that a prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo.

In 1936, Anna Freud, in a book written while her father was alive and in the spirit of the work of his disciples, Sandor Ferenczky, described the defense of identifying with the aggressor, and Bettelheim was giving concrete illustrations of this unconscious, self-defeating process. So the allegation is...

He is massaging his experiences so that they fit this psychoanalytic framework, right, that he has already accepted as valid and that he wants to be respected in. Right. People look for evidence to support the ideas they already believe. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And one of the real issues here is that, you know, it's not it's not the case that no one in the camps reacted this way. Right. There are there were prisoners who attempted to ingratiate themselves with the SS who, you know, who did stuff like what Bruno describes. That is a thing that happens. You can find cases like that in all of the camps. But he one of the things he'll claim is that like.

There isn't prisoner resistance and there's a ton of prisoner resistance. Prisoners are constantly acting to sabotage the camps, to sabotage the SS guards. That is a thing that happens at every camp. It's a thing that happens at Buchenwald while he's there, right? He knows that there's prisoner resistance.

And he he erases that from his story because it doesn't comport with psychoanalytically what he what he thinks he should be reporting on there. Right. He's a very unethical, unreliable guy. Yes. Yes. Yes. In ways that are very strange. There's like not enough other voices to be able for people to be able to recognize that as quickly as you would have hoped they would be able to.

Yes, and he's also going to – he does a lot of victim blaming. He will repeatedly criticize Jews for taking acts that provoke anti-Semites. In a 1947 work, he describes anti-Semitism as being caused in part by the failure of Jewish people to see anti-Semites as individuals and to understand them.

One scholar, Peter Bloss, Dr. Peter Bloss, has stated many Jews were offended because he felt that to some degree the Jews provoked the actions of the Nazis. So he is criticized again at the time. But a lot of folks like Eisenhower, who certainly aren't plugged into like the community of Jewish survivors, are like, this sounds right to me. You know? Yeah. I am misunderstood. Now, the issue here isn't that Bruno has no right to a different opinion about these things.

Every inmate has a different experience and everyone reacts. And I'm not even blaming if prisoners-

attempt to befriend SS guards to survive. I'm certainly not blaming anybody for doing that. You do whatever the fuck you have to do to get it through that experience. And that's going to include a lot of ugly things, you know? And also acting like you support them is different than what's maybe going on internally. Yes. I am. I am strongly of the opinion that when it comes to what people do in the camps, we certainly can't judge anyone who was in that position. Um,

That said, I think we can judge the stuff that Bruno does afterwards, right? And he's going to give a lot of contradictory stories, enough that we can't really say in every instance what happened, but we can safely say he twisted his experiences later in recollection to make points that he wanted to make.

And again, this is going to have a big influence on early Holocaust scholarship. The film Sophie's Choice is heavily based upon his recollections of camp life. 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.

Bruno even admitted later that the, quote, main problem for him during his time incarcerated was to safeguard his ego in such a way that, by if any good luck, he should regain liberty. He would be approximately the same person he was when deprived of liberty.

I wonder, though, also that he knew that people were working on the outside to get him out. Yes. Yes. That probably really impacted how he viewed himself in the camp. Because he was like, no one else has like this into the American government trying to get them a visa. Like, I am special. I do deserve to be freed in this way that other people don't. Because that's been sort of his MO his whole life. Yes. Yes.

You know, to to view himself as better than those that other people assimilate him or view him as being like. Yeah. And I think that's a really good like this. This need for him to feel special and better, even than like his fellow inmates colors, how he writes about this in a very interesting way.

And it allowed him to keep that belief because there was an element that he was special and different because he had these people working for him. So it wasn't completely unfounded. And that's another reason why also it's so problematic that – because obviously his experiences – this is a portion of the Holocaust that's super important to understand, the period of time when he's in these camps. That's a part of the concentration camp story. Right.

But the experience of this guy who, number one, has a good chance of surviving, knows that from the outset pretty much, and has people working for him on the outside as opposed to

Hungarian Jews in 1944, right, who there's no one coming, right? Like we have fallen off the edge of the planet. You can't his his experience is as different from that person's as a regular person not in a camps is from his Bruno's experience, right? Like,

These are just forced to face the same thing. You're not forced to face the same like level of despair and yeah. And certain death and abandonment. And, you know, you can avoid these, this stuff that I think creates a, makes you different in your brain that just fundamentally changes who you are. He was able to like avoid that. And he's, he's going to come to one other very weird conclusion because he's

One of the results of this is he becomes obsessed with the idea of the total institution, which the concentration camp is a total institution, right? One that completely dominates your life, right, while you're in it. And he starts to wonder, obviously the Nazis created a total institution to destroy people. What if you did the same thing for – what if you made a good concentration camp? Oh, God. Yeah.

And this is going to be his chief motivation as a child development expert. That's a leap. I don't know that I'd go there. Seems kind of problematic, buddy. That's a bad cult, but I can have a good cult. What if I did a good one? Well, that sucked, but I think I can fix it. Yeah.

Okay. That is the end of part one. How are you feeling, Allison?

I feel like I know where we're going and I'm and I'm terrified. Well, yeah, it's next episode. We will be Bruno in the United States and we will be talking about how he redefines the care of children with autism. And again, he is not treating kids with autism, almost exclusively not. I mean, presumably some of them are children with autism, but most of them are just rich kids that he is abusing.

He's abusing all of the kids. Let's be clear about that. And I think it's also, I would urge people to look into RFK's wellness farms that he has been speaking about. And there is a, there is a, an instinct that, that remains throughout history that, that we can just shake certain things out of certain people. And it is incredibly harmful and false. Yeah. And,

And that is absolutely like the tactic he is going to take. Is that like if you – because that's his attitude about the total institution. I saw how concentration camps altered the personalities of the people interned there. You can alter a child who is acting in a way that you see as problematic by creating a total institution to reform them.

Right. And that's his attitude towards what he calls autism, what he calls schizophrenia. We can cure all of these by changing, by creating a total institution, you know? So that's problematic. All right.

Allison, do you want to plug anything right at the end here for where people can find you? Yes. You can order my new rom-com novel, Save the Date, anywhere books are sold. And you can also follow my sub stack, Emotional Support Lady, for weekly writings about all things mental health. And I'm also available as a relationship coach seeing individuals and couples.

All right. Awesome. Well, Allison, thank you so much. We will be back on Thursday. Until then, everybody, try not to do this.

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 iHeartRadio 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 slash at Behind the Bastards.

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