Portfolio at NYU

Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1969)
Reissued in paperback by Simon & Schuster in 2001.

After surviving the horrors of living in a World War II Nazi concentration camp, Bruno Bettelheim immigrated to the United States and became a pioneer in treating childhood mental disorders. The bulk of his research was intended for psychoanalysts counseling young children, though some of his work was much more accessible and written as a guide for parents.

The Children of the Dream is one such book. In it, Bettelheim thoroughly analyzes the communal childrearing methods of an Israeli kibbutz in response to a series of books that stated kibbutzim children did not develop into psychologically healthy adults. For example, he explores the North American attitude that children are taught to remain dry, while kibbutzim parents in Israel show more ambivalence to bedwetting. Bettelheim persuasively argues that how parents react to their child's bedwetting "pertains not just to the narrow issue of toilet training but to the basic one of whether or not to use their parental prerogative to mold their children's lives."

Although Bettelheim spent only seven weeks studying predominantly one kibbutz in 1964, which raises the question as to how similar other kibbutzim may be, he offers rational cultural explanations for differences between how Israeli and U.S. parents raise their children. And in the end, he successfully shows that multiple kinds of parenting styles can transform children into healthy adults.

During his career as a psychoanalyst, Bettelheim was best known for asserting that reading fantasies and fairy tales were part of a healthy child's psychological development. His 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment, won him the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. In 1990, he died of suicidal asphyxiation in a Chicago nursing home at age 86.

MORE:
An Overview of Bettelheim's Work