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Overview
From one of the world's leading child psychologists comes a new collection of wide-ranging essays in which he reflects on the people, events, and cultural influences that have shaped him and his work.Eighteen essays by the famous psychoanalyst about cultural, intellectual and emotional experiences that shaped his life; a passionate defense of Freud's humanism.
Synopsis
In books like The Uses of Enchantment, Freud and Man's Soul, and Surviving and Other Essays, the celebrated psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has pursued meaning everywhere from children's fairy tales to the death camps of the Holocaust, where he himself was incarcerated in 1938. Now, in a collection whose subjects range from fin de siecle Vienna to the myth of the "wolf boy" to contemporary children's television, he brings together the themes and experiences of a lifetime's search for understanding.
Publishers Weekly
Combining humanistic wisdom and clinical insight, this gathering of 18 essays reflects eminent psychoanalyst Bettelheim's concerns as both child therapist and Holocaust survivor. One provocative piece profiles Sabina Spielrein, who supposedly had a secret affair with her therapist Carl Jung, a relationship said to have played a role in Jung's breakup with Freud. Other outstanding pieces cover Bettelheim's visit to Dachau extermination camp in 1955, where he had been a prisoner; and explore sex and death in his native Vienna, birthplace of psychoanalysis. Bettelheim writes movingly of Miep Gies, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank from the Nazis. Articles on movies as an art form, and on children in relation to TV, museums and cities are bland. Bettelheim concludes with a revision of his 1962 attack on ``Jewish ghetto thinking,'' which he claims led to passivity and resignation on the part of Holocaust victims--a viewpoint challenged by many historians. (Jan.)