Word: bettelheim
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Bruno Bettelheim...
Psychoanalysts tend to believe that nothing happens by accident, so Bruno Bettelheim has a theory about why psychoanalysis, and indeed "all modern methods of treatment for mental disturbances," first emerged in Vienna. The fact that Sigmund Freud lived there is too easy. More fundamental was the half-hidden disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated on the battlefield by Prussia, torn apart by Balkan nationalism and devastated by the bank crash...
...reigning Empress Elisabeth was half mad or, as Bettelheim more clinically describes her, "hysterical, narcissistic, and anorexic." And the heir apparent, Crown Prince Rudolf, climaxed a sexual episode by killing both his mistress and himself. Yet this was also the era of The Blue Danube. Bettelheim's conclusion: "Things had never been better, but at the same time they had never been worse; this strange simultaneity, in my opinion, explains why psychoanalysis, based on the understanding of ambivalence, hysteria, and % neurosis, originated in Vienna and probably could have originated nowhere else...
This engaging book is not really about Freud's Vienna, however, so much as Bettelheim's Vienna. The two men shared the same city for more than a third of a century. Freud had recently published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, when Bettelheim was born in 1903. He became interested in psychoanalysis because another schoolboy was impressing Bettelheim's girlfriend with prattle about the new theories of Dr. Freud. As a young man, Bettelheim liked to walk past Freud's establishment at Berggasse 19. "Looking up at his quarters, I always wondered why this great man chose...