Bruno Bettelheim Quotes

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.

If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the “dark beauty of violence,” and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.

Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: 'The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.

Nuestra reacción ante la lectura está más en la función de lo que sucede en nuestro interior que del contenido del libro... Los libros reposan en espera de que estemos preparados.

what redeems us as human beings and restores us to our humanity is solicitude for those whom we love.

The child, so much more insecure than an adult, needs assurance that his need to engage in fantasy, or his inability to stop doing so, is not a deficiency.

All my life, I have been working with children whose lives were destroyed because their mothers hated them.” 1981 re: cause of autism

He disappears, and her endless wanderings in search of him take her to the moon, the sun, and the wind.

Maybe if more of our adolescents had been brought up on fairy tales, they would (unconsciously) remain aware of the fact that their conflict is not with the adult world, or society, but really only with their parents. Further, threatening as the parent may seem at some time, it is always the child who wins out in the long

Therefore, even more than at the times fairy tales were invented, it is important to provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence.

When a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business as usual.

If you are gone [from your homeland] for fifteen years, you will not return. Even if you return, you will not return.

Bruno Bettelheim, who might have had more influence if he weren’t, as Dr. Spock himself noted, a “[v]ery frightening” figure who “scared the hell out of people.” A Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a stern manner, and some outlandish ideas, Bettelheim gave people the creeps, and after his suicide in 1990, we’d learn there was good reason: his credentials were faked,

The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.

Bettelheim had another domain of fraudulent, self-aggrandizing blaming that evokes particular revulsion in me, in that he was a classic anti-Semitic Semite, blaming his fellow Jews for the Holocaust. Addressing a group of Jewish students, he asked, “Anti-Semitism, whose fault is it?” and then shouted, “Yours! . . . Because you don’t assimilate, it is your fault.” He was one of the architects of the sick accusation that Jews were complicit in their genocide by being passive “sheep being led to the ovens” (ever hear of, say, the Warsaw Uprising, “Dr.” Brutalheim?). He invented a history for himself as having been sent to the camps because of his heroic underground resistance actions, whereas he was actually led away as meekly or otherwise as those he charged. I have to try to go through the same thinking process that this whole book is about to arrive at any feelings about Bettelheim other than that he was a sick, sadistic fuck. (The quote comes from R. Pollack, The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim , London, UK: Touchstone [1998], page 228.)

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and educator at the University of Chicago, wrote one of the most perceptive articles about education in the aftermath of Sputnik. He observed that while liberal policymakers urged racial integration they simultaneously favored intellectual segregation. Writing in Commentary in 1958, he said that northern white liberals wanted to obliterate the color line while replacing it with a hierarchical caste system based on intelligence. The movement to the suburbs was one way to ensure that their own children had a leg up on everyone. But gifted programs (and the new Advanced Placement programs in high school) promised middle- and upper-class whites (and some blacks who made it out of poverty) greater access to the highest-quality education. Despite all the Jeffersonian talk about how talented inhered in all classes, the poor were unlikely to benefit from gifted programs or the new curriculum projects. A new caste system was in the making, parodied so brilliantly in Michael Young's 1958 fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Bettelheim sarcastically asked why elite liberals were so worried. "Have these so-called gifted been winding up in the coal mines, have so few of them managed to enter Harvard, Yale, City College, or the University of Chicago?

The fairy tale offers the child hope that someday the kingdom will be his. Since the child cannot settle for less, but does not believe that he can achieve this kingdom on his own, the fairy tale tells him that magic forces will come to his aid. This rekindles hope, which without such fantasy would be extinguished by harsh reality. Since the fairy tale promises the type of triumph the child wishes for, it is psychologically convincing as no "realistic" tale can be. And because it pledges that the kingdom will be his, the child is willing to believe the rest of what the fairy story teaches: that one must leave home to find one's kingdom; that it cannot be gained immediately; that risks must be taken, trials submitted to; that it cannot be done all by oneself, but that one needs helpers; and that to secure their aid, one must meet some of their demands. Just because the ultimate promise coincides with the child's wishes for revenge and a glorious existence, the fairy tale enriches the child's fantasy beyond compare.

But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.

If only we could recall how we felt when we were small, or could imagine how utterly defeated a young child feels when his play companions or older siblings temporarily reject him or can obviously do things better than he can, or when adults—worst of all, his parents—seem to make fun of him or belittle him, then we would know why the child often feels like an outcast:

Bruno Bettelheim studied Israeli adolescents who had been brought up in kibbutzim. He found that the high value placed upon shared group feelings was inimical to creativity. I believe they find it nearly impossible to have a deeply personal opinion that differs from the group’s, or to express themselves in a piece of creative writing – not because of the repression of feelings alone, but because it would shatter the ego. If one’s ego is a group ego, then to set one’s private ego against the group ego is a shattering experience. And the personal ego feels too weak to survive when its strongest aspect, the group ego, gets lost.

In chess one realises that all education is ultimately self education. This idea is a timely consideration in our data driven world. Chess lends itself to structural information and quantitive analysis in a range of ways. For instance the numerical value of the pieces, databases of millions of games, computerised evaluation functions and the international rating system. However, the value of the experience of playing the game is more qualitative than quantitive. Like any competitive pursuit or sport, chess is an elaborate pretext for the production of stories. The benign conceit of rules and points and tournaments generates a narrative experience in which you are at once co-director, actor and spectator. Chess is education in the literal sense of bringing forth, and it is self education because our stories about a game emerge as we play it, as we try to achieve our goals, just as they do in real life. Chess stories are of our own making and they are often about challenges we overcame or failed to overcome. Every chess player knows the experience of encountering a vexed colleague whose desperate to share their tragic tale in which they were “completely winning!” until they screwed up and lost. And yet we also know tougher characters who recognise that taking resolute responsibility for your mistakes, no matter how painful, is the way to grow as a person and a player. As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim says: "we grow, we find meaning in life and security in ourselves by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others”.

In addition, he noted the vital importance for prisoners of keeping some area of decision, however small, which is entirely their own. Even the prisoner who agrees to be totally at the mercy of his captors can retain some degree of autonomy: by for example deciding whether to eat the bread he is given, or to save it for future consumption. On such apparendy trivial decisions may depend whether or not the prisoner retains any sense of being an independent entity. Although, for the most part, prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were not held in solitary confinement, the importance of retaining some capacity for independent decision-making is also stressed by Bruno Bettelheim. From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors’ aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them.

Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.

He said: “My mother washed out my mouth with soap because of all the bad words I used, and these had been pretty bad, I admit. What she did not know was that by washing out all the bad words, she also washed out all the good ones.” In therapy all these bad words were freed, and

No ha sido en los claustros universitarios en donde se ha renovado el pensamiento moral sino en los escritos de Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Bruno Bettelheim, Viktor Frankl, Imre Kertész, Paul Steinberg, Jorge Semprún, todos ellos han retomado la reflexión sobre la condición humana en situaciones límite, sobre la espiritualidad, la búsqueda del sentido, una vez rotas las bisagras de la seguridad, la conservación de sí, y los parámetros del pensamiento tranquilo. Hannah Arendt y Tzvetan Todorov han meditado sobre estos testimonios dándonos obras admirables.

This is the tragedy of so much "child psychology": its findings are correct and important, but do not benefit the child. Psychological discoveries aid the adult in comprehending the child from within an adult's frame of reference. But such adult understanding of the machinations of a child's mind often increases the gap between them—the two seem to look at the same phenomenon from such different points of view that each sees something quite different. If the adult insists that the way he sees things is correct—as it may well be, seen objectively and with adult knowledge—this gives the child a hopeless feeling that there is no use in trying to arrive at a common understanding. Knowing who holds the power, the child, to avoid trouble and have his peace, says that he agrees with the adult, and is then forced to go it alone.

As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm – yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.

Pszichológusok úgy vélik, például Bruno Bettelheim, hogy egy kiegyensúlyozott, értelmes ember, akit nem rontott meg a polgári nevelés, képes alkalmazkodni az új körülményekhez egy Auschwitz-szerű helyen. Én máshogyan gondolom. Azt hiszem, hogy Auschwitzban legjobban a kényszerneurotikusok találták fel magukat, akiket a paranoia fenyegetett, mert ők ott landoltak, ahol a társadalmi rend – vagy rendetlenség – utolérte a kényszerképzeteiket.

You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained. Von Schuschnigg was in a concentration camp; so was Bruno Bettelheim for a time. The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but they often came back from these places. Not until the 1940s did the words "concentration camp" come to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.