Bruno Bettelheim ( 1903 – 1990 ) R Paul Marcus

BRUNO BETTELHEIM WAS born in Vienna to uppermiddle-class assimilated Jewish parents, Pauline and Anton Bettelheim, on 28 August 1903. Though born when the Hapsburgs still ruled the Austro-Hungarian empire, Bettelheim grew up during the age of Freud. By age fourteen he was already voraciously reading in psychoanalysis, an angle of vision that was to inform his later writings on survivorship and the Holocaust. Bettelheim received his doctoral degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of Vienna in 1938. Soon after, he was incarcerated for approximately one year, as a Jewish political prisoner in two punishment-oriented concentration camps, Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim was released in 1939 thanks to the intervention of Gov. Herbert Lehman of New York and Eleanor Roosevelt.