Survivor
Anthony Storr
Surviving and other Essays Bruno Bettelheim (Thames & Hudson £10) Until he retired, Bruno Bettelheim was director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, an institution which specialises in the treatment of autistic and psychotic children. This book brings together a number of interesting pieces on education and .the emotional problems of children, including one on A.S. Neill and Summerhill. Bettelheim, himself a psychoanalyst, deplores the misapplication of psychoanalysis to education. Whilst never failing in compassion toward the emotionally distorted, he believes in the oldfashioned virtues of effort and application, considers that the child's original super-ego is necessarily based upon fear, if not of punishment, at least °floss of love, and, in a final essay on 'Art and Art Education', insists that the undisciplined outpourings of the unconscious can only be transmuted into art by means of hard-won conscious skills.
Although Bettelheirn's contribution to our understanding of psychotic children is important, it is by his account of the concentration camps that he will be remembered. Bettelheim, during 1938-39, spent a year in Dachau and Buchenwald. His book about his experiences, The Informed Heart, has long been famous; but he has written many other papers about the camps, some of which are collected here. In his preface, Bettelheim apologises for the fact that, since these essays cover a span of 37 years, readers of his books will inevitably be subjected to some repetition. He need not be modest. What he has to say is of such signal importance to our understanding of human nature that it cannot be too often repeated.
To anyone over 50, the story of concentration camps of Nazi Germany is the heart of darkness. No-one who saw those first newsreel pictures of Belsen can ever be the same person again. For a long time, I could not bear to read about the camps. Then, for a variety of personal and professional reasons I had to do so. There must be many who, like myself, still feel that it is impossible to come to terms with the camps: who, if they have read the literature, for ever after feel that 'this is Hell, nor am Tout of it'.
The hydrogen bomb is the most immediate threat to our continuing existence; but the bomb is mere technology, a tribute to man's inventiveness. as well as to his capacity for destruction. The concentration camps are of a different order of evil; the central, inescapable horror of the 20th century. The gas chambers in which so many innocent millions were slaughtered were not the worst of it. The ultimate horror was the systematic degradation of living human beings. Stripped of the last vestiges of human dignity, decent, sentient people were deliberately reduced to stinking, shuffling, emaciated automata covered in excrement whose lives had been rendered meaningless. And who were the men who perpetrated these dreadful acts? Eichmann, Stang!, Wagner and the rest were not sadistic psychopaths or crazy murderers, but petits bourgeois. They belonged to the culture of civilised Europe, to our culture. In other words, they were men like you and me.
Bertrand Russell wrote of Conrad: 'He thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.' If the concentration camps have any message at all for us, it is surely that Conrad was right. In the ordinary course of a settled existence, most of us need never be aware of, or try to face, our own secret capacities for cruelty; but those who, for whatever reason, have felt it necessary to explore the depths of their own natures in analysis will know that those capacities cannot be denied, and are of all human potentialities for evil, the most difficult to face.
In recent years, Bettelheim has been criticised, especially by Terrence des Pres in The Survivor, for his insistence on the preservation of autonomy as the determinant of survival rather than mutual aid. Even in extreme conditions, temperaments vary; and other inmates of the camps have placed different emphases upon which factors determined death or survival. I do not find myself able seriously to criticise anyone who went through the camps. I have learned a great deal from Bettelheim's account of his own survival. It was probably the fact that he was able to use his psychoanalytic experience and insight to distance himself from the impact of what surrounded him that made it possible for him to come through. Bettelheim was not only able to survive, but also to make positive use of his experience. His understanding of psychotic children, he tells us, owed a great deal to his observations of how human beings react to extreme situations. This collection of papers bears witness to a long and fruitful life devoted to the care and treatment of some of the most distressed and inaccessible patients who come the way of psychiatrists. It also celebrates the fact that the human spirit can sometimes triumph over Hell itself.
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