The Informed Heart

by Bruno Bettelheim

In 1938-39, Bruno Bettelheim was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. In order to keep alive and remain human, he began to analyze his own behaviour and that of everyone around him. This book is a record of those years.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, History, Holocaust, Jewish, Philosophy, Memoir

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his views on autism and for his claimed success in treating emotionally disturbed children.

Reviews

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly difficult book to rate and review. Bruno Bettelheim was another one of those crazy-Austrian-pyschologist-types like Siggy Freud, but Bettelheim's focus was primarily on child psychology. There's a lot of debate about his early theories on autism - his belief was that autism is not organic but actually occurs due to a mother's coldness towards the child, "refrigerator mother". That's hard for me to stomach and I want to throw really large objects on Bettelheim's corpse, but remind myself that this work of his was done in the early-mid 20th-C, and true understanding and awareness of autism is relatively new. Research is finding new things all the time, so. Okay. I'll cut Bettelheim a little slack for being a product of his generation and culture.

(This does not excuse his alleged views on corporal punishment of children.)

Alright, so Bettelheim was probably a douche. Putting that aside, however, I've enjoyed things I've read by him on the topic of fairy tales and fables (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales) and have found I've been interested in other things he proposed, even if I haven't fully agreed with him.

My interest in The Informed Heart was piqued by references to it in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in regards to autonomy. The passages Friedan discussed were about Bettelheim's time spent in a concentration camp, and an experience he witnessed of a woman who was a previous dancer before she was sent to the camp. A guard discovered she was a dancer and made her dance for him; she danced right up to him, took his gun and shot him. She, in turn, was gunned down by other guards, but the point Bettelheim was making (that Friedan included in her own work as an illustration) was that as soon as the woman was given a chance to live, even minutely, in a manner that she had previously allowed her to feel free and secure and self-confident. She likely knew she was going to die by her actions but that didn't matter. She had autonomy.

Pretty heady stuff.

Bettelheim covers a lot of ground in The Informed Heart, from the dangers of advancement of technology to his experiences in the concentration camp. Out of context it's hard to see how the two would really work side-by-side, but Bettelheim made it work. I was reminded often of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and his work with logotherapy, essentially the belief that searching for one's meaning and place in life is the driving force behind one's actions. Bettelheim's discussion on autonomy isn't all that different from Frankl's logotherapy, but reading Bettelheim made me want to re-read Frankl again. I feel what Frankl said was better and made more of an impact on me. Plus, Frankl said it first. I think Bettelheim could just have said, "Yeah, what [Frankl] said!"; instead he wrote a 300+ page book about his own views that sort of meandered a bit.

Of most interest was his views on why concentration camp members did not often commit suicide even when they understood their fate. I won't give it away here, I do recommend a good read of The Informed Heart. I was also interested in what Bettelheim had to say about Anne Frank and her family, and how their death was quite senseless - had they not been as concerned with staying together as a family unit and focusing on bringing their belongings into hiding with them, they may have had a chance of survival. According to Bettelheim, it was their desire to remain together that was their undoing.

Food for thought, in any case.

Overall this was an interesting read, even when I may not have agreed with Bettelheim's opinions. This was often a difficult read because of the information he shared about his time in the camp, and I often had to put the book down and not read it all at once.

[Pippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had some really interesting reflections on the concentration camps. It is difficult - and you need to read carefully to pick out the gems amongst the psychoanalytical stuff. Something that he said struck me with a cold force when I was re-reading it recently. He wrote about how people forget what the concentration camps were really about. They weren't about sadism gone mad. They were cold blooded experiments to calculate what the state could get away with - how far you could rob people, and take away their individuality and dignity, and still get work, and obedience, out of them. He wrote about the typical responses to life in the camps, and about those who survived, and some of the reasons they survived. It is so gruelling to me that I think this is the first time I've managed to read it with 100% focus. It is a really important book, not least because it shows that we are none of us immune to our environment. The logical next step, which I don't think he makes, is that the guards were also victims. It was the SS that brutally wiped out all trace of humanity in normal human beings, and made them into monsters. One point he makes is that many victims, after long enough in the camps, began to identify with the guards and to accept the cruelty and murders as normal. We could none of us be sure that we were immune. So, it spreads like a virus. (But this is my extrapolation). Well worth close study.

Forgot to say, the only totally weird thing about this book is that women aren't mentioned. He talks about how it affected men's sense of themselves as head of the household - as if it was only men in the camps. Did some camps only have men, or did he just not think the women worth mentioning?

[rachy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to Bettelheim’s ‘The Informed Heart’ by way of Milton Sanford Mayer’s ‘They Thought They Were Free’, in particular, from this quote that, in light of current events, I found a little unshakeable: ”It is the German Jew who, in a minority, will soon or late dominate Israel; already we hear, in Israel, of what we think of peculiarly German forms of extremist tendency, the same tendency towards “Nazi” behaviour observed among the Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald by Professor Bruno Bettelheim.” The almost eerie presentiment of this statement made seeking out Bettelheim’s ‘The Informed Heart’ inevitable.

Now, I was maybe a little disappointed to find that I didn’t strictly see what Mayer saw in Bettelheim’s work on this exact score, but fortunately, in a similar vein to what Mayer was able to glean, given what he already saw reflected in the ever evolving world around him, I too found plenty of insight into the psychologies that allowed for the nazis to take and hold power so completely for so long, that are hard not to see reflected in our increasingly uncertain modern times.

For example, in talking about middle class prisoners in the camps and their particular difficulties, he states: “political enmity towards professional people was aggravated by class resentment. Communists and Socialists had actually fought the SS and SA, which implied they had taken the Nazis seriously as valid opponents in a fight among equals. The intelligentsia, on the other hand (and not only the German intelligentsia), had chosen derision rather than fighting the Nazis face to face.” This is included only as a footnote, but I couldn’t help but get stuck on it, given the obvious reflection of significant points of political upheaval in our lifetime, such as the Brexit Referendum, or Trump’s first election. I remember acutely how many people mocked it, derided it, and stubbornly (and often pretentiously) refused to see it as a genuinely credible threat. It’s interesting to see the ways in which this particular quality is not new, and the damage this kind of attitude has done in the past.

Similarly, his discussion on Anne Frank and her family was particularly striking. Not only did I find it unprecedented, I haven’t seen anyone posit that it should have been possible for them to outmanoeuvre nazi capture, but in what else I also recognised in this. Bettelheim supposes that it was their unwillingness to change anything about their life (i.e. refusing to split up the family, trying to take as many possessions as possible with them, which would have helped them avoid detection) and how this ultimately led to the sad end that it did for them. Now, any controversy surrounding this remark notwithstanding (it’s hard to know how true all of this is, and I’m not qualified to speculate further on it), it’s hard not to see a glimmer of similarity between our modern society equally sleepwalking into crises due to our unwillingness to deviate even a little from our known comforts, whether this be on the subject climate change or being out on the street protesting things like the online safety act. One of the things that struck me most during and after the pandemic was both how clear it made the need for important structural changes within society at large, but equally how completely unwilling people were to entertain this in any real way, simply wanting desperately to get back to the same old life they had (no matter how unfit for purpose), rather than to endure just a little more to evoke imperative change. Obviously this is an extreme example, and any direct comparison to events like this under Nazi rule evoke disbelief and accusations of hysteria (and sometimes rightfully so), but I nonetheless found this parallel unavoidable.

Now, I am given understand that there is plenty of controversy surrounding Bettelheim himself and his professional practices, however, if you’re not already reading this with a pinch of salt, if you’re expecting to put complete faith in a psychologist born more than a hundred years ago, knowing all the myriad advances made in such a field over that time (and the comparatively dark age treatments that took place before these), that’s simply a poor way to approach this book, and any similar one from this era. Like anything else, it’s important to read a book like this critically, to obtain what it’s possible to obtain, and recognise that the rest is hampered by its disproven and outdated attitudes.

I think, provided all of this is taken into consideration, if you’re looking for an interesting examination into the minutiae of what harm a hostile environment the concentration camps and nazi rule in general could do to a healthy mind, from someone who lived under it, laid out comprehensively and without moral judgment, you could do worse than ‘The Informed Heart’. It has plenty of important insights, as long as you’re willing to take the time to parse them through the psychobabble and obviously outdated attitudes and practices. I definitely consider it a valuable resource, for those with the inclination to find the value in it.

[Jörg Schumacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

In diesem 1960 erschienenem Werk, geht der aus Österreich stammende amerikanische Psychologe Bruno Bettelheim der Frage nach, wie der Mensch in der modernen Gesellschaft seine Autonomie bewahren kann.
Die vorliegende Ausgabe wurde 3 Jahrzehnte nach dem Original veröffentlicht und jetzt von mir noch mal 30 Jahre später gelesen. Wieviel hat mir dieses Buch heute noch zu sagen ?
Sowohl Titel als auch Klappentext der deutschen Ausgabe führen in die Irre. Der Originaltitel lautete: "The Informed Heart; Autonomy in a Mass Age" und gibt den Fokus dieser Abhandlungen besser wieder, denn es geht mehr um die Elemente der Persönlichkeit, die das Individuum zum Erhalt seiner Autonomie im Umfeld einer Massengesellschaft benötigt. Aber es gibt keine Anleitung wie dies geschehen kann, dies bleibt der Leser*in als Aufgabe übertragen, sich selbst über seine Werte und die eigenen Grenzen von Freiheit und Anpassung klar zu werden.
Der Hauptteil des Buches setzt sich mit Bettelheims Erfahrung in den Konzentrationslagern Dachau und Buchenwald auseinander. Diese Teile des Buches sind sehr bedrückend aber beleuchten auch sehr wichtig, die inneren Mechanismen eines Konzentrationslagers, die uns die heute üblichen WWII Dokumentationen nicht liefern können. Insgesamt nimmt Bettelheim die Nazidiktatur als Beispiel für eine Massengesellschaft im Extrem. Darin liegt wieder die Aufgabe für die Leser*in, sich über Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen totalitären und liberalen Massengesellschaften, in denen wir heute glücklicherweise in Westeuropa und Nordamerika leben, Gedanken zu machen.
Das letzte Kapitel ist noch einmal eine Sammlung von Denkansätzen, darüber, wie ein totalitäres System sich eine Gesellschaft von Gefolgsleuten schafft und dass die Autonomie des Individuums die Voraussetzung von Demokratie und Liberalität in einer Massengesellschaft ist.
Ja, auch nach 60 Jahren, hat uns Bettelheim etwas zu sagen. Der Untertitel "Die Chance des Individuums in der modernen Gesellschaft" führt in die Irre, es gibt hier keine Anleitung, wie Mensch sich seine Autonomie bilden und bewahren kann, sondern nur die Erinnerung daran, wie wichtig diese Autonomie für das Überleben des Individuums ist. Die einzelnen Themen im Buch sind nicht erschöpfend behandelt, sondern erfordern Mit- und Weiterdenken. Die Sprache ist vor-feministisch und in ihrer patriachalischen Sichtweise für heutige Leser*innen ungewohnt.
Insgesamt ein interessantes auch wichtiges Buch, das ich aber nur mit den obigen Einschränkungen empfehlen kann.

[S K Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as we are in lockdown.

Key thoughts from the book:

Government overreach may have long term negative ramifications much as Bettelheim observed as long term ramifications from the experiment with prohibition.

Barring individuals from decision making in matters vital to them - e.g. work, worship, seeing loved ones - is extremely harmful. This is informative of the current resistance to lockdowns that are perceived as too draconian, or not rational in scope or application.

Persons who already have little autonomy readily accept fast rate of societal change seems to reflect the sheeple who without thought or analysis automatically obey.

Bettelheim emphasizes that the Hitler/Nazi authoritarian state forced the citizens into childlike behavior. Again similar struggle is occurring as the lockdowns persist - some citizens obey others say trust us as adults to make wise decisions. The more authoritarian leaders insist they be obeyed stating they are trying to save the lives of their citizens who say they prefer liberty.

“Men are not ants. They embrace death rather than an ant like resistance.”

The last chapter reminded me so much of Orwell’s 1984.

The comments on the effectiveness as tools of the tyrant of symbols such as the Hitler salute and ever present photographs of Hitler (or in the USSR, Stalin) brought to my parallels around the world at the present time.

He observes in passing how well the Jehovah’s Witnesses behaved in the concentration camps but dismisses faith as primitive. The concept that a strong religious faith could have positive impact in forming and maintaining personality is ignored.

[Dramatika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Для нас всех особенно актуально сейчас! Продолжаем сопротивление тоталитарному режиму во всех его проявлениях!

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A super powerful book. The Book didn't go into the details some of the atrocities that happened in the concentration camps in Buchenwald and Birkenau and Auschwitz. It did however look at the psychology of how individuals reacted to certain situations and dilemmas they were put into. The book had thousands of insights which the author was able to capture during couple of years of incarceration in those concentration camps. He had to memorize a lot of the things because of course he couldn't write them down. Some of the stories mentioned book though it lacks that detail but is still heartbreaking but some of the insights that he was able to glean in his time there are shown and articulated with clarity. Again and again your brain shouts out at you: How can mankind be so unkind to mankind?!!! Here are some of the best bits:

Had there been willingness on the part of the Free World to take them in, a great many more Jews would have resisted and many more would have tried to escape in time and many many more would have survived. The fact that the rest of the world closed itself deprived them of the strength they needed to try to stay alive: it robbed them of their will to resist.

This then was the particular form in which nature-nurture presented itself to me: in order to create the good Society it is first important to change Society radically enough for all persons to achieve full self-realization? Psychoanalysis could be discarded with the possible exception of a few deranged persons. But Russia it was apparent by the 1920s was not creating the society that could generate full self-realization to man. Social democracy was the next best bet and I joined but with hesitations and misgivings. It was clear enough that it was not going to create a better Society until it's ranks and leadership were first peopled by better men.

My experience in the camps told me almost within days that I had gone much too far in believing that only changes in man could create changes in society. I had to accept that the environment could as it were turn personality upside down and not just in the small child but in the mature adults also. (this point highlights the importance of your environment)

Children who have been told or conditioned to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communications coming from the TV screen and the emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real people because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actors. Worse they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones that they see on the screen and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The TV child acting events in his own life expects to follow in sequence with a beginning a middle and a predictable solution all of it explained and made plain by one of the chief actors or by the master of ceremonies, is discouraged because life is too complicated. Conditioned to being given explanations he has not learnt to puzzle on his own and gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him and is thrown back once more to find comfort in predictable stories on the screen.

The danger of our machine made wealth grows out of this: that for the first time we are living in an age when material comfort is possible for almost everyone. We will need more and more technological progress to cover up our emotional want and discomfort

Unfortunately decision-making is a function which like some nerves or muscles tend to atrophy when it lies fallow. In terms of psychoanalytic theory decision making is not just an ego function. On the contrary it is the function that creates the ego and once created keeps it going and growing.

The fewer meaningful decisions he needs for survival the less he may feel the need or the tendency to develop his decision-making abilities

That technology offers great advantages we do not doubt. What we meant to get out of is whether and how much these advantages add to the successful living together of man with his fellow man. Because that alone will make further integration seem so worthwhile that he will readily achieve it.

We no fear a mass society in which people no longer react spontaneously and autonomously to the vagaries of life but I'm ready to accept uncritically the Solutions that others offer.

Yes a major supporter of any society is the ability of its citizens first to decide and then to accept personal responsibility for their own actions. This is quite difficult when too much of what we do depends on the cooperation of others or is regulated by them.

Fortunately total control is alien to the Western world. True choices are still open but by now they are seriously threatened. Very little bylaws and only to a very limited degree by managed mass persuasion but mass persuasion would never again much of a foothold we're it not for the deepening anxiety of uncertain man.

When the intimate relationships are accompanied by hostility, guilt, shame it is a more powerful obstacle to the child's ability to have successful intimate relationships in his own later life than any other single factor.

If I should try to sum up in one sentence what my main problem was during the whole time I spent in the concentration camps, it will be this: to protect my inner self in such a way that if by any good fortune I should regain Liberty, I would be approximately the same person I was when deprived of that very same Liberty when i entered.

For example prisoners who went insane and there were quite a lot of them will no longer isolated, protected or sent to mental institutions, but were ridiculed and chased about until they died.

Just survive not as a shadow of the SS but as a man one had to find some life experience that mattered, over which one was still in command.

Listen you, make up your mind: do you want to live or do you want to die? If you don't care don't eat the stuff. But if you want to live there's only one way: make up your mind to eat whenever and whatever you can, never mind how disgusting. Whenever you have a chance, defecate, so you'll be sure your body works. And whenever you have a minute, don't chatter, read by yourself keep your head down and sleep. That was the best advice that Bruno bettelheim had received the concentration camp he was at.

In the camps they were called "Muslims" because of what was erroneously viewed as a fatalistic surrender to the environment as Muhammadans are supposed to blindly accept their fate.

To survive as a man not a walking corpse as a debased and degraded but still human being, one had first and foremost to remain informed and aware of what made up one's personal point of view and no return beyond which one would never under any circumstances give into the oppressor even if it meant risking and losing ones life.

Once a commando Jewish prisoners was working alongside some Polish Gentile prisoners. The supervising SS spied on the Jewish prisoners who he thought to be slacking and ordered them to lie down in the ditch and calls on a Polish prisoner to bury them alive. The Polish guy froze and refused to obey. At this the SS officer beat the Polish guy who nevertheless still refused to obey. Furiously the SS now ordered the two Jews to get out of the ditch. The Polish guy was put in there instead and the Jews were to bury him instead. In Mortal anxiety hoping to escape the Fate themselves the Jews shoveled Earth into the ditch and onto their fellow prissoner. The polish guys head was barely visible when the SS ordered them to stop and Unearthed him. Once the Polish guy was on his two feet the two Jews were ordered back into the ditch and this time the Polish guy obeyed the commands to bury the Jews possibly because they had not resisted burying him or perhaps expecting that they too would be spared at the last minute. But this time there was no reprieve and the SS officers stamped down the earth that lay still loosely over his victims. 5 minutes later he calls on to other prisoners to unearth the Jews but though they worked frantically it was too late. One was already dead and the other dying. The SS officer ordered them both to be taken to the crematorium. f*** what an incredibly sad story.

How long it took a prisoner to stop considering life outside the camp as real depended to a great extent on the strength of his emotional ties to his family and friends, the strength and richness of his personality and the degree to which he was able to preserve important aspects of his old interests and attitudes.

Since the Hitler state considered human beings objects it was often more practical to correct mistakes on the humans instead of and their files. If errors were made in the counting of new arrests they were rectified by adding or liquidating enough of the humans to make up the difference on paper. F*** What Crazy bastards those Nazis were.

That going on with life as usual was not an absolute value, but can sometimes be the most destructive of all attitudes.

I stated many times in this book that the success or failures of any mass society will depend on whether or not man so reshapes his personality that he can modify The Society into one that is truly human. In our case into one we are not coerced by technology but bend it to our human needs.

Conditions for the Independent existence of the individual is his personal responsibility for his acts. When we select a group of German citizens show them the concentration camps and say to them you are guilty: we are affirming a fascist tenant. Whoever accepts the doctrine of the Guilt of a whole people helps to destroy the development of a true democracy which is based on individual autonomy and responsibility.

[Nixie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a memoir, but an analysis.
How to deal with the anxieties new technology gives us? What on earth are Trump's voters thinking or feeling? How to cope with a fast-changing world? The book talks about all this and much more.
So, don't be seduced into passivity. Read. Think. For yourself.

[Kelly Kasulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listen, you have to read this with an open mind and also leave room for a healthy amount of skepticism. It is a psychology book written 60ish years ago, by a man who lived in a concentration camp and who had extensive expertise in psychology.

I find that the first half of this book is widely applicable to any aspect of life, and barely has overlap with the Holocaust at all. The second half is about Nazi Germany and the camps. But the overarching themes here are about the factors that help or hurt an individual’s chance of holding onto their personhood in times of torture/war, the factors that affect the ability for one to remain in the driver’s seat of their life despite societal and social pressures, and the tight rope one must walk between accepting and adapting to circumstances as they are (for the sake of survival) while also preserving the inner self so as to not lose one’s self esteem and dignity. It discusses the perhaps shocking ways in which self esteem and dignity are essential to one’s chance of survival under hardship and physical duress.

I found parts of this book applicable to my everyday life, and parts of it only applicable to understanding WW2 or the potential for future state tyranny. It’s a very interesting read and not your typical “Holocaust book.” I would hardly call it that.

[mega them · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found myself absolutely enthralled by this... then I looked up the author online and found out he was totally discredited. He was an abuser who may have fabricated large parts of this book. So now I'm just confused about what I should and should not believe in it.

[Oleksandr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of obsolete opinions without any proofs.
There are some good ideas, but it just doesn't worth digging and analysing if the advice is based on good ideas.

[Gabriela Svagr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Thanks!

[Chris Brûl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cette lecture m'a beaucoup appris sur la situation que subissait les prisonniers dans les camps de concentration.Il est très intéressant d'entrer dans cet univers avec l'auteur, qui présente non le théâtre de l'horreur humaine mais comment l'humain peut perdre son humanité. Bien intéressant avec un point de vu psychanalytique.

[Otherorganism · Rating 5 out of 5]

touching yet still really incisive. i get a special thrill from reading books if they somehow bleed into other things for e.g. n without wishing to sound facetious when i was reading this a couple of years back i was watching celebrity big brother n whilst obviously a more benign variation on group dynamics the psychological parallels were breath taking.

[Ilya Cherkasov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Круто, по хардкорному круто. Обыденно, без эмоций, о том, как умирают люди -- сначала ментально, а потом уже физически.

[Chris Brûl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lecture difficile mais très pertinente pour la compréhension psychique des martyrs juifs. L'humain est une bête qui n'attend que les bonnes circonstances pour se manifester.

[Matthew Giobbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bettelheim enriches me in surprising ways every time.

[Stephen Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1938, Bruno Bettelheim, along with a number of other Jewish-born Austrians, was sent by the Nazi regime to Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. There he began a process of analysing his own reactions to the camps, along with those of other victims, anti-Nazi German prisoners, and also the various types of officer. The result was two decades later written as 'The Informed Heart,' which sought to explain and understand the meaning of such extreme situations.

Bettelheim is a controversial figure. Since his death in 1990 a number of controversies have developed – his explosive rages which sometimes fell upon his students, possible plagiarism in his excellent study of the deeper meanings of fairy stories 'The Uses Of Enchantment,' misrepresentation of his own credentials when escaping to America in 1939, and more. He was greatly interested in autism, but became enamoured of a theory which blamed the mothers of such children, a theory now entirely discredited. But despite these major defects he did produce remarkable work, of which 'The Informed Heart' is one of the best.

Bettelheim opens with a couple of introductory chapters before heading off into a discussion of freedom, in which he observes: It is not so much that modern man is so much quicker to surrender his freedom to society, nor that man was so much more autonomous in the good old days. It is rather that scientific and technological progress has relieved him of having to solve so many problems that he once had to solve by himself if he meant to survive…

Bettelheim saw a specific situation developing through the 20th century where: … [there is] less need to develop autonomy… and more need for it if he prefers not to have others making decisions for him.

This double whammy is one of Bettelheim’s central concerns. The rest of the book deals with the experiences themselves: methods of coercion in the camps, the defences used by victims, and what he called ‘the fluctuating price of life,’ in which a few of the more extraordinary and horrific situations are observed.

The book concludes by remarking that ‘men are not ants.’ The success or failure of any mass society, Bettelheim thinks, is dependent upon whether or not a humane society can be created by people who have ‘reshaped their personality.’ In this regard Bettelheim was close to Erich Fromm’s view that a humane society cannot possibly be created by inhumane individuals; he wanted to understand, as Fromm did. And Bettelheim states the dangers of people being coerced by technology, seeing that tyranny has its own momentum. I don’t think the various Bettelheim controversies reduce the impact and relevance of this book.

[John Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long hard read, but good ideas if you stick with it.

[Lorène · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pas du tout habituée aux bouquins de psycho, j'ai mis un temps fou à rentrer dedans et j'ai souvent décroché. Je suis malgré tout contente d'être allée jusqu'au bout.
Ce livre basé sur des observations factuelles est à la fois glaçant et d'utilité publique. Les exemples datent d'une époque (à la fois lointaine et beaucoup trop proche) et ils parlent parfaitement : c'est terrible. Je recommande.