Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Thu, 27 Feb 2025
Bruno Bettelheim has now made it to the United States, where he executes his elaborate plan to fix "emotionally disturbed" children by making a nice concentration camp.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is Bruno Bettelheim and why is he controversial?
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people and problematic people. And we've got both this week with the story of Bruno Bettelheim, a man who is really, really testing my previous conclusion that there's no wrong way to react to having been in a concentration camp. Maybe this way. Bruno might have been the guy to figure out the wrong way. Had to lose all sympathy. Yeah.
My guest with me again, as in part one, Alison Raskin. Alison, how are you doing? It's the same day, but we pretend it's a separate one.
Chapter 2: What personal experiences does Alison Raskin bring to the discussion?
I'm good. What I didn't reveal in episode one, which I feel like will be more relevant for this part of his life story, is that I actually have had OCD since I was four years old. So I was someone who was treated for pretty...
severe mental illness as a young child and was put on Prozac when I was four and was actually incredibly thankful for my parents being proactive in that way and getting me the help that I needed. So I'm like not someone that is at all against taking children's mental health seriously. And it's like kind of a lot of the activism I do.
But I think we're about to explore a scenario where that goes wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Yes, exactly.
Well, it's also – it's interesting because a big part of Bruno's story and a big part of like where people go wrong because like as you said, it's good to be involved and care about your children's mental health and the mental health of children in general. Bruno, as a young man, takes this kid in who is like neurodivergent and her mom just like, I don't want to raise a kid. Right.
Find someone else to do it for me. And Bruno's whole business as an adult is not just I'm helping kids who are having problems. It's I am taking these kids away from their rich parents who do not want to deal with them and handling them. Which is very different from the healthy version of this where you're just – because I have a lot of empathy even in this time, right?
Where we talk about like he's diagnosing kids as things that we would not today because they just don't – I'm not judgmental of someone who legitimately is trying to help kids and is just like we called things by different names then. We didn't know as much as we know now. It's one thing to make errors.
It's another thing to have your whole goal be what if a concentration camp but nice for children? Yeah. Which is, again, part of the motivating factor here.
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Chapter 3: How did Bruno Bettelheim's past influence his actions in the US?
This is Joe McCormick from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Did you know over the course of your lifetime, on average, you'll listen to 681 audiobooks, create 987 playlists, and discover 2,365 new music artists? It's hard to name one thing that'll last you a lifetime, except Frontier Fiber, with reliable 100% fiber optics powered by the speed of light.
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My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying. Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a freaking crazy man. He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
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Chapter 4: What was the Orthogenic School and how did Bettelheim change it?
No.
And it's his way of of like making sure that he's in with the with the people in power.
And he is he has he does a lot of writing about his attitudes that like he doesn't like Christianity either because he's not a religious guy, but he thinks it's better than Judaism. Right. And so the school will be specifically a Christian school even when it sort of is educating kids who don't come from Christian families. He like tries to acculturate them.
The only holiday they celebrate at the school is Christmas. So his attitude is very much even when the students are not – from a Christian background, I want to acculturate them as white Christians, right?
And that is – Me, a Jewish man, would love to do that. Yeah, I know exactly how to celebrate Christmas. Yeah.
Now, Bruno justifies his whites-only policy by arguing that racialized children, that means non-white kids, would confuse the white kids and harm their recovery. The term racialized to describe kids that just aren't white? No, these kids, they can't handle the shock of seeing someone who isn't white. That'll fuck up their recovery.
If that person doesn't look exactly like me, I have to commit a crime. I can't handle it.
I can't handle it. I'm going to go rob a bank. Now, Bruno also wrote that he was only interested in white students from, quote, good high-class stock. That meant kids whose families could afford to send them to college. He instituted a tuition of $8,000 to $12,000 a year to ensure that no poor children were educated at the orthogenic school.
That's in the 40s?
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Chapter 5: Why was Bettelheim's approach to child psychology criticized?
It's interesting to me that if he were to have said at this time, obviously you spank kids, you know, sometimes you slap them a little bit. That would not have been controversial. That would have been in the 40s, well within the standards of like normal childhood education, right? The fact that he's like, no, no, no, you should never do this, but is still doing it is so interesting to me.
He's a deeply troubled man.
Yeah. This guy, Alvin Rosenfeld, who was Bruno's colleague and friend, partly defends the fact that Bettelheim uses physical violence. He argues that unlike most institutions at the time, the orthogenic school didn't use shock therapy. It didn't have restraints or any other violent tools. But sometimes the kids were so out of control that they needed physical intervention.
And Bruno courageously handled that unpleasant task for his subordinates. assuring that, quote, they were free to be far more nurturing. He admits that Bettelheim sometimes meted out punishment that included slaps, but he frames this as minor for the era. Now, I won't say that what he did was extreme for the era, but it wasn't mild, right?
And we have a lot of reports from kids who were with him during this period of time, and they do not report a mild experience. And I don't talk about this a lot on the show because I'm not an expert or an educator, but I did work in special ed as a paraprofessional for the better part of two years.
And I'm unwilling to give detailed stories on the air for reasons that should be obvious and relate primarily to the privacy rights of those children. But I will say that I dealt with – primarily kids who were frequently violent and who were about my size, right? These are 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds. And many of them are non, the term we would use at the time was nonverbal.
And because of my size, I worked with these kids very closely because I could take a hit and I was hit every day on that job, right? One of my colleagues suffered a near fatal injury, a TBI, another had a broken jaw. So this was a, I understand sometimes you have to use restraints to protect yourself and others, right?
With kids who, and some of the kids were what we would call emotionally disturbed. There were a variety of diagnoses that you had there. I'm aware of the need sometimes to restrain kids. And so I want to emphasize that's not what's going on with Bruno, right? Right. For one thing, restraining is sometimes there's force involved in restraining a kid. It's not violent.
Your job is not to harm them physically. Your job is to stop them from causing harm to themselves and others. And sometimes the only way to do that is to like physically hold them so that they can't
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Chapter 6: What were the experiences of children under Bettelheim's care?
He asked what I hoped to become when I grew up. A scientist, I replied. Ridiculous, he spat. You want to be a scientist? You can't even read! Again... This is a child. Oh my God. He's like- Holy fuck, dude.
He's like a villain out of a Bond movie.
What is going on here, Bruno? Like, from the standards of a period of time in which parenting was, shall we say, rough. Like, that is bad child rearing. Um-
It's also very funny to, like, imply that the children were allowed to give consent and had to give consent. Yeah. Given that at that time period, I think the idea that children could give consent or should was, like, not a normal concept.
The idea that adults could give consent wasn't really a normal concept.
But, like, I feel like very few families, like, viewed children at that time as autonomous individuals who were worthy of giving consent. You know, so, like... No way was that happening.
And it's such a weird thing that he would insist on like telling the lies he chooses to tell are always very strange to me.
But they also they also are revealing of how much he actually knows of what he's doing is wrong.
Yes. Yes. That's a very good point that he does understand that this should be a thing the child consents to. He just doesn't give a fuck.
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Chapter 7: How did Bruno Bettelheim justify his methods?
And he will say he has an 85% success rate in treating schizophrenia and autism, and that 85% of the kids that came into his school left it without these diagnoses. He's not curing these people. He is declaring them to have a thing and then declaring them cured when they behave in a way that he describes as idealized, right?
And that's kind of key to it is that he gets described as brilliant for a while because of this big 85% success rate. He is the only person judging these kids, right?
Well, it's I mean, this is like a thing that happens in society. These like troubled teen industry like this is not like an isolated incident of this kind of group where these kids are declared as so problematic and then taken into this extreme environment.
And then you sort of have a cult like figure at the helm and and all of these employees sort of just like go along with this, even though it's like it is like this dynamic that sort of has that continues to sort of play out.
And so there are definitely, like, I'm someone who finds, like, I don't think it's so wild to describe things as cults or as cult-like if they follow certain, you know, descriptors. And this definitely feels rather cult-y to me.
If the Kool-Aid bowl fits, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the difference is that these kids are not are not members of the cult the way you would see in other situations. They're they're sort of the prisoners of the cult.
Yeah, and I think WB is trying to describe a lot of the employees.
The employees are the members.
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Chapter 8: How did Bettelheim's trauma potentially affect his behavior?
Which is an interesting and a damning way to describe that. I think this is our second ad break, so let's just go for it.
This is Joe McCormick from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Did you know over the course of your lifetime, on average, you'll listen to 681 audiobooks, create 987 playlists, and discover 2,365 new music artists? It's hard to name one thing that'll last you a lifetime, except Frontier Fiber, with reliable 100% fiber optics powered by the speed of light.
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It's Ryan Seacrest here, looking for ways to feel your best in 2025. I want to share one of my biggest and best tips. When I want to feel my best, I make sure to check my gut health. That's so important. It's why I drink HealthAid Kombucha daily.
It's powered with probiotics, which helps me feel less bloated and more refreshed, with so many delicious flavors like Pink Lady Apple, Passion Fruit Tangerine, and Ginger Lemon. It's such an easy way to support my health. Look for the brown bottle with an anchor on it. Find it now at Pavilions.
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Takes one guy out there to say, who's that Kyle who thinks he can just get on a microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this shit?
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