Surviving and Other Essays

Bettelheim was born in Vienna, Austria, of middle-class Jewish parents. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna and became a follower of psychoanalysis. In 1938, with the German annexation of Austria, Bettelheim was incarcerated in Dachau and later Buchenwald for one year. He was released upon the intervention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York’s Governor Herbert Lehman. He immediately came to the United States and took up residence in Chicago. The psychiatrist took a position as a professor in the Orthenogenic School, which studies emotionally disturbed children. Bettelheim became an expert on children’s emotional disorders and treatment of such diseases. He wrote a major article on his camp experience, show more “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” which was accepted by the U.S. Army in 1943. The Informed Heart and the long essay “Surviving” deal directly with Bettelheim’s concentration camp experience and his reflections on the meaning of it. Sickly, in a nursing home in California, he took his own life at age 87.

The key essay in this book analyzes the movie Seven Beauties, a spoof on a comic figure in a concentration camp, and the book The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres, an examination of why inmates survived in both Soviet and Nazi camps. For Bettelheim, surviving alone was no virtue. Keeping one’s moral integrity was. Losing one’s dignity, he believes, would be worse than death. Bettelheim rails against Seven Beauties’ death house comedy. Such works confuse aesthetic discrimination. The observer is induced not to take the murderous situation seriously. The psychiatrist notes that those who had strong religious conviction had a much higher chance of survival. His own experience in the camps informs him that cooperation rather than selfishness was more commonplace in the camps. According to Bettelheim, the situations described in the movie Seven Beauties are not credible and the characters are not believable, particularly the female commandant. She understood human nature too well, says the author, to commit such horrible acts. The man who threw himself into a sewer of waste rather than submit to continued indignities is the writer’s hero. Bettelheim’s critics believe that his views are unrealistic and border on a “blame the victim” psychology. show less