A Day with Bruno Bettelheim

Noted psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took his own life on March 13, 1990. Some found that strange. I have my own ideas.

The famous psychologist Bruno Bettelheim died March 13, 1990, by his own hands. Some found it strange that the man who wrote so convincingly about “surviving,” who had himself survived internment in the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, should have chosen this manner of death. Others have suggested that he never completely left behind the pain of being a prisoner, and that his wife’s death in 1984 (as well as his own debilitating stroke in 1987) explain much. I have my own ideas.

We went to lunch in 1982. In the car on the way to the restaurant and throughout the meal, we hotly argued our interpretations of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” I insisted it dealt with “separation anxiety” but he was adamant that the subject was “oral greed,” and he pointed to the way the children ate their parents out of house and home and then were rapacious when they arrived at the Gingerbread House. When the waitress rolled the dessert cart by the table, Bettelheim took a piece of chocolate cake; after we had talked some more, he took a second; finally, a third. There’s a parable there.