WEBVTT - Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist 0:00:01.760 --> 0:00:04.080 Alsome Media. 0:00:04.280 --> 0:00:07.520 Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm 0:00:07.600 --> 0:00:11.760 Robert Evans, and I am again alone without my producer, 0:00:11.880 --> 0:00:12.760 Sophie Lichterman. 0:00:12.840 --> 0:00:13.200 Today. 0:00:14.000 --> 0:00:18.120 She is recovering from a health thing of a jig 0:00:18.760 --> 0:00:20.560 and we all wish you the best. She will be 0:00:20.600 --> 0:00:24.239 back soon. But you know who's not back soon, because 0:00:24.239 --> 0:00:28.560 they're here today, Alison Raskin. Allison, welcome to the show. 0:00:29.280 --> 0:00:30.920 Oh, thank you so much for having me. 0:00:31.320 --> 0:00:33.760 Yeah, thank you for being on. You and I are 0:00:33.760 --> 0:00:37.120 going to have a long conversations about a very weird 0:00:37.240 --> 0:00:39.320 dude today. But before we get into that, we should 0:00:39.320 --> 0:00:44.680 talk a little bit about you. You are a writer, director, comedian. 0:00:45.479 --> 0:00:47.720 You are the co author of the book I Hate 0:00:47.760 --> 0:00:51.080 Everyone But You, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yeah, 0:00:51.120 --> 0:00:52.480 is there anything else you want to kind of plug 0:00:52.560 --> 0:00:53.240 up at the top here? 0:00:53.960 --> 0:00:57.200 Oh? Yes, that feels like an outdated bio a little bit. 0:00:58.920 --> 0:01:00.960 I do a lot of a lot of different stuff 0:01:01.680 --> 0:01:06.720 these days. I primarily prote myself as a writer still 0:01:06.760 --> 0:01:10.000 and then a relationship coach, a mental health advocate. So 0:01:10.240 --> 0:01:12.840 I've had two nonfiction books come out about sort of 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:15.880 the intersection of mental health and relationships and then I 0:01:15.959 --> 0:01:19.040 have a rom com novel coming out in April called 0:01:19.120 --> 0:01:23.160 Save the Date, which is loosely based off of a 0:01:23.280 --> 0:01:28.360 multiverse version of my own broken engagement, so a fictionalized 0:01:28.400 --> 0:01:30.319 version of what could have happened afterwards. 0:01:30.840 --> 0:01:34.800 Well, that is very appropriate that you work in mental health, 0:01:34.840 --> 0:01:37.200 because the guy we're talking about today is one of 0:01:37.240 --> 0:01:39.559 the worst things that ever happened to the mental health 0:01:39.600 --> 0:01:41.559 field in the. 0:01:41.640 --> 0:01:45.480 Entire really bad at that. 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:52.720 We are talking about a fella named Bruno Bettelheim. Have 0:01:52.800 --> 0:01:54.200 you heard of Bruno Bettleheim. 0:01:55.080 --> 0:01:55.720 No, I don't. 0:01:55.760 --> 0:01:58.720 I actually do have a master's in psychology. But he 0:01:59.320 --> 0:02:01.520 did not come up along that journey. 0:02:01.840 --> 0:02:02.800 Yeah, he was. 0:02:03.160 --> 0:02:06.520 He would have described himself as, and was usually described as, 0:02:06.560 --> 0:02:10.280 an expert in child psychiatry and the treatment of autism. Now, 0:02:10.360 --> 0:02:14.680 oh no, here's the thing. Number one, absolutely not in 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:19.760 any like legitimate way an expert in child psychiatry, and 0:02:19.840 --> 0:02:22.880 also not at all an expert in the treatment of autism. 0:02:23.040 --> 0:02:26.280 His primary thing was to declare kids to have autism 0:02:27.080 --> 0:02:29.720 and then treat them in a way that we would 0:02:29.800 --> 0:02:33.200 just describe as hitting them. Primarily, that's the way this 0:02:33.240 --> 0:02:36.080 guy worked. There's a lot more to him than that. 0:02:36.320 --> 0:02:39.920 Even he was a very very strange man. It's kind 0:02:39.960 --> 0:02:41.720 of important that you know that the outset that when 0:02:41.760 --> 0:02:44.320 we talk about again, the kids that he was working 0:02:44.320 --> 0:02:48.239 with were described as having autism and schizophrenia. Today, most 0:02:48.240 --> 0:02:50.240 of them we would just describe as kids with like 0:02:50.360 --> 0:02:53.800 mild behavioral problems like like twitching a little bit in 0:02:53.880 --> 0:02:56.640 class or something, or not being good at doing math. 0:02:56.760 --> 0:02:56.959 Right. 0:02:58.000 --> 0:03:00.480 These were not terms that meant the same thing that 0:03:00.520 --> 0:03:04.519 they do today, because diagnostic criteria in the early nineteen 0:03:04.600 --> 0:03:06.280 hundreds was just not what it is now. 0:03:07.480 --> 0:03:12.200 So it's just a history of misdiagnosing children and also 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:16.240 a lot of racism when it comes to misdiagnosing children. 0:03:16.360 --> 0:03:18.959 Oh, and a lot of racism in the Bruno Bettlelheim's story. 0:03:19.280 --> 0:03:23.480 I'm sure there is, yeah, both as a victim and 0:03:23.600 --> 0:03:27.480 as a perpetrator, because Bruno came He's an Austrian like 0:03:27.560 --> 0:03:31.880 most of the really fascinating like early twentieth century mental 0:03:31.880 --> 0:03:35.320 health professionals, and his family he came from this like 0:03:35.400 --> 0:03:38.760 wealthy subset of the Austro Hungarian Jewish population. That's like 0:03:38.800 --> 0:03:42.080 his family comes from money and comes from money within 0:03:42.240 --> 0:03:45.520 like the Austro Hungarian Empire's Jewish population, which is like 0:03:45.520 --> 0:03:51.160 a whole separate subset of like the imperial population. He 0:03:51.200 --> 0:03:54.160 would later claim, because he makes a lot of statements 0:03:54.200 --> 0:03:58.040 about his background, again almost none of which are true, 0:03:58.280 --> 0:04:01.280 that his paternal grandfather had been an orphan who had 0:04:01.280 --> 0:04:04.320 been raised and educated as a rabbi, and like he 0:04:04.600 --> 0:04:07.200 got the attention of the Baron Rothschild, who made him 0:04:07.240 --> 0:04:09.560 a tutor to his heirs, and he was so good 0:04:09.560 --> 0:04:12.280 at teaching these kids that they gave him command of 0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:15.560 the family bank, and he made the family fortune doing that. 0:04:17.040 --> 0:04:21.200 Definitely not true, almost certainly is not what happened. That said, 0:04:21.360 --> 0:04:23.479 the actual real story of his family name is. 0:04:23.480 --> 0:04:24.200 A lot cooler. 0:04:24.839 --> 0:04:27.159 And I don't know why he tells this bullshit story 0:04:27.240 --> 0:04:30.760 about like him being a banker, because the name Bettelheim 0:04:30.839 --> 0:04:34.320 came from sometime in the seventeen hundreds, the Slovakian nobleman 0:04:34.440 --> 0:04:37.599 named Count Bethlin fell for the wife of a Jewish 0:04:37.600 --> 0:04:41.000 citizen and tried to kidnap her on his horse, and 0:04:41.080 --> 0:04:43.640 her husband charged in and beat the count in hand 0:04:43.680 --> 0:04:47.400 to hand combat. And given like the racial politics at 0:04:47.400 --> 0:04:49.960 the time, this was a ballsy move right for this 0:04:50.000 --> 0:04:51.840 guy to come in and just like wail On, a 0:04:51.880 --> 0:04:55.080 major member of the nobility, and so he got the 0:04:55.200 --> 0:04:58.520 nickname Bethlen from the guy he beat up Judah, which 0:04:58.560 --> 0:05:02.240 is like you know Jewish, right, And that was like 0:05:02.440 --> 0:05:05.479 where the name Bettelheim came from. After a few decades later, 0:05:05.520 --> 0:05:07.920 the Habsburg's decreed everyone had to have a last name, 0:05:08.320 --> 0:05:11.880 and so that became Bettelheim for reasons I'm not that 0:05:11.960 --> 0:05:14.240 don't entirely make sense to me, but it's a pretty 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:15.400 cool origin story. 0:05:15.560 --> 0:05:16.440 It's very cool. 0:05:17.040 --> 0:05:19.760 Yeah, beating the hell out of account, beat it like 0:05:19.839 --> 0:05:22.160 a guy on horseback too, which. 0:05:22.000 --> 0:05:26.560 Is like, you have some sounds like a tall Jews 0:05:27.640 --> 0:05:28.320 itself guy. 0:05:28.640 --> 0:05:35.039 Yeah, I did disclaim here that I am Jewish. 0:05:35.120 --> 0:05:37.600 So that's where probably where the name Bettelheim cut. Like 0:05:37.640 --> 0:05:40.120 any sort of this is a mid seventeen hundred's family 0:05:40.200 --> 0:05:43.360 last name origin story. Maybe none of this is true, right, 0:05:44.560 --> 0:05:48.919 we'll never really know whatever the case. Bruno's father and 0:05:49.120 --> 0:05:52.360 grandfather kind of make their fortune trading wood. That's where 0:05:52.360 --> 0:05:55.600 the family money comes from, right, They like own forests 0:05:55.720 --> 0:05:57.400 that they plant and chop down. 0:05:58.000 --> 0:05:58.160 Uh. 0:05:58.200 --> 0:06:00.599 And they're in just kind of like the wood product business, 0:06:00.640 --> 0:06:03.640 you know, and they do very well as a result 0:06:03.680 --> 0:06:08.640 of that, the Bruno's dad, Anton, starts a lumber business 0:06:08.680 --> 0:06:12.240 in nineteen oh seven with another guy, and Anton and 0:06:12.279 --> 0:06:15.919 Paula Bettleheim, Bruno's parents. They first have a daughter, Margaret, 0:06:15.920 --> 0:06:18.360 in eighteen ninety nine, and then on August twenty eighth, 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:21.520 nineteen oh three, they welcome Bruno into the world. By 0:06:21.520 --> 0:06:24.159 this point, Anton's lumber business was doing very well and 0:06:24.200 --> 0:06:26.960 the family was probably maybe not in the top one 0:06:27.000 --> 0:06:29.240 percent because like this is an empire and they're not 0:06:30.080 --> 0:06:33.080 in the nobility, but like that super far from the 0:06:33.080 --> 0:06:37.120 top one percent, right, They're very wealthy, as is customary 0:06:37.160 --> 0:06:39.440 for the rich in this period of time. Bruno's mother 0:06:39.520 --> 0:06:42.960 refused to nurse him. He suffled from a professional wet 0:06:43.000 --> 0:06:45.159 nurse for the first three years of his life, and 0:06:45.240 --> 0:06:47.520 later wrote that his mom was too much the Victorian 0:06:47.600 --> 0:06:51.360 lady to do it herself. This is again super normal 0:06:51.400 --> 0:06:53.920 at the time, although it also seems to have kind 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:57.760 of messed with Bruno because he's never he's never cool 0:06:57.800 --> 0:07:00.280 with his mom, and he will later project a lot 0:07:00.279 --> 0:07:03.440 of his issues with her onto mothers in general. 0:07:04.720 --> 0:07:09.440 Yes, that is also a common theme in early psychology early. 0:07:09.800 --> 0:07:12.480 Yeah, exactly, especially for Austrians. 0:07:12.760 --> 0:07:16.320 Yeah, maybe a whole deal going on there. 0:07:17.000 --> 0:07:17.200 Yeah. 0:07:17.280 --> 0:07:19.520 Now again it's kind of he's going to later talk 0:07:19.560 --> 0:07:22.200 a lot about his mother being cold and like not 0:07:22.400 --> 0:07:25.560 a very kindly person, but in other writings from a 0:07:25.760 --> 0:07:28.200 like while he's a young man, he'll describe her as 0:07:28.240 --> 0:07:31.040 loving and attentive. And again, he's a guy who makes 0:07:31.120 --> 0:07:33.000 up a lot of stories about the past. So I 0:07:33.000 --> 0:07:35.760 don't know if he actually had his mom was actually 0:07:35.840 --> 0:07:37.520 cold to him when he was a kid, or if 0:07:37.520 --> 0:07:41.480 something happened later that made him kind of retroactively decide that. 0:07:42.440 --> 0:07:44.840 But it's very different from how like other people who 0:07:44.920 --> 0:07:48.320 knew them when he was a little kid described their relationship. Too, 0:07:49.480 --> 0:07:52.240 We'll never know. Like most boys in the late Victorian era, 0:07:52.360 --> 0:07:55.240 he had several brushes with death. He like, he has 0:07:55.280 --> 0:07:59.160 this classic thing where he eats poison berries. No, and 0:07:59.240 --> 0:08:02.040 this doctor just gives him a shitload of coffee to 0:08:02.120 --> 0:08:05.120 fix it. I think the idea is that, like, we 0:08:05.200 --> 0:08:06.960 just need to have him pee all of this out 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:08.280 right old time. 0:08:08.800 --> 0:08:11.280 So wait, so other people thought that his mother was loving, 0:08:11.560 --> 0:08:13.200 hecounts was that okay? Got it? 0:08:13.240 --> 0:08:13.840 Got it? Yes? 0:08:13.880 --> 0:08:17.720 And he will describe at varying points very different kinds 0:08:17.720 --> 0:08:20.760 of relationships with his mom, like as a young man, 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:23.240 he writes that quote, while he was sick, my mother 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:26.320 sat up my bedside, sponging my feverish body and changing 0:08:26.360 --> 0:08:29.320 the cold compresses to give me relief. In moments like these, 0:08:29.360 --> 0:08:31.440 I learned to understand and appreciate that a mother makes 0:08:31.480 --> 0:08:33.360 all the difference in the world when one is in need, 0:08:33.480 --> 0:08:38.160 in great pain, deeply worried, or even desperate. Now this 0:08:38.400 --> 0:08:40.880 is noteworthy, the fact that he has these kind of 0:08:40.920 --> 0:08:43.720 two different attitudes about his mom, because, as his biographer 0:08:43.800 --> 0:08:47.520 Richard Pollock notes, no prominent psychotherapist of his time was 0:08:47.559 --> 0:08:49.839 as antagonistic to mothers. And that is. 0:08:49.840 --> 0:08:59.840 Saying something, Wow, Freud, He's beating Freud in the issues 0:09:00.240 --> 0:09:00.920 mom game. 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:08.240 Yes, yeah, that's like dunking on Jordan's. So again, there's 0:09:08.280 --> 0:09:11.640 not really a clear explanation forthcoming as to this. Bruno 0:09:11.679 --> 0:09:14.679 does recall later being raised as an older boy by 0:09:14.720 --> 0:09:17.440 his aunt as much as his mother, and often hiding 0:09:17.440 --> 0:09:19.720 at her place to avoid his sister Margaret, who he 0:09:19.760 --> 0:09:20.440 described as. 0:09:20.360 --> 0:09:21.160 A busy body. 0:09:21.880 --> 0:09:24.000 This is all pretty normal kids stuff, you know. 0:09:25.000 --> 0:09:25.640 At any rate. 0:09:25.679 --> 0:09:28.719 The overwhelming recollections of the people who knew Bruno and 0:09:28.760 --> 0:09:31.680 his family was that his parents were doting and involved 0:09:31.679 --> 0:09:33.959 and if anything, his mother may have smothered him a bit. 0:09:34.440 --> 0:09:37.559 His father, Anton was a peculiar man. For the era. 0:09:37.679 --> 0:09:41.360 Germanic fathers are known as being stern and strict, often 0:09:41.520 --> 0:09:44.880 like well past what we would describe as abusive. What's 0:09:44.880 --> 0:09:47.839 weird about Anton is that, like even today we would 0:09:47.840 --> 0:09:50.640 call him kind of a permissive dad, like we would 0:09:50.679 --> 0:09:52.400 say today, like this guy could have maybe could have 0:09:52.440 --> 0:09:54.520 stood to be a little bit more like strict with 0:09:54.640 --> 0:09:58.439 his kids, which is very rare for an Austrian father. 0:09:59.120 --> 0:10:01.480 One anecdote Bruce later gave was that he got in 0:10:01.520 --> 0:10:03.600 trouble for cursing in front of his mother and she 0:10:03.800 --> 0:10:05.680 like went to it. She was like, Anton, your son 0:10:05.800 --> 0:10:08.600 just you know, cursed in front of me and her father. 0:10:08.760 --> 0:10:12.400 His father became upset, not that Bruno had cursed, but 0:10:12.440 --> 0:10:14.560 that he now had to punish his son, and he 0:10:14.600 --> 0:10:16.560 even asks Bruno, do I really have to punish you 0:10:16.600 --> 0:10:18.480 to get you to stop cursing in front of your mother? 0:10:19.080 --> 0:10:21.200 Which you know, the norm would have been probably to 0:10:21.240 --> 0:10:23.280 smack him right like, just based on sort of the 0:10:23.320 --> 0:10:27.920 standards of the time. Bruno's education is fairly strict, but 0:10:27.960 --> 0:10:30.600 that's normal for his social class and the era. He 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:33.520 attends the finest school in Vienna, and he was an 0:10:33.520 --> 0:10:36.400 excellent student, one of five out of fifty four in 0:10:36.480 --> 0:10:39.920 his year to be noted as having been excellent. He 0:10:40.040 --> 0:10:43.360 spent the war years World War One, that is, in school, 0:10:43.400 --> 0:10:45.240 which is another mark of his good luck. You know, 0:10:45.320 --> 0:10:47.880 he's born in this sweet spot where he doesn't have 0:10:47.960 --> 0:10:50.360 to go die in on the Italian border, or in 0:10:50.360 --> 0:10:53.640 Serbia or in Russia, all of which were like beloved 0:10:53.720 --> 0:10:56.640 pastimes of Austrian teenage boys in these years. 0:10:57.679 --> 0:10:59.760 And he's just like, my mom's too nice. 0:10:59.640 --> 0:11:01.760 My mom, my mom's two is too nice to me. 0:11:04.080 --> 0:11:05.480 My dad let me get away with. 0:11:05.480 --> 0:11:10.360 Stuff, just daydreaming about charging a machine gun nest. No, 0:11:10.760 --> 0:11:12.880 he's not a super militant kid, but he does get 0:11:13.000 --> 0:11:15.920 very lucky right now. The war years are difficult even 0:11:15.960 --> 0:11:18.319 for the rich. Bruno is better off than most of 0:11:18.360 --> 0:11:20.439 the populace. He's never he and his family are never 0:11:20.440 --> 0:11:23.520 in danger of starving to death, but they do go hungry. 0:11:23.640 --> 0:11:26.360 Everybody does right with it, with the exception of like 0:11:26.400 --> 0:11:29.720 the top of the royal family. Everybody in Austria is 0:11:29.720 --> 0:11:32.319 going hungry at least a little bit during the war years. 0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:36.600 It's just a terrible time, right this. The war is 0:11:36.679 --> 0:11:39.960 bad for his family fortunes. Huge tracks of their Bettelheim 0:11:40.120 --> 0:11:43.880 land get lit like burnt down own by artillery bombardment 0:11:43.960 --> 0:11:46.840 right at the start of hostilities. But his family doesn't 0:11:46.880 --> 0:11:50.280 lose everything, and Anton seems to have been an unusually 0:11:50.320 --> 0:11:53.560 tenacious and brilliant businessman. By the time the war ended 0:11:53.600 --> 0:11:56.640 and the Habsburg Empire with it, the Bettelheims were still 0:11:56.800 --> 0:11:59.760 comfortably wealthy, right, which is takes a lot that's not 0:12:00.000 --> 0:12:02.800 easy to maintain in this period of time. So it 0:12:02.840 --> 0:12:03.959 says a lot about Anton. 0:12:05.040 --> 0:12:07.760 This guy seems great that that seems he seems. 0:12:07.480 --> 0:12:09.559 Like a pretty good dad for the era, about as 0:12:09.600 --> 0:12:13.240 good as you get out for Bruno's schooling was mixed 0:12:13.720 --> 0:12:16.120 as a again that he is not going to he's 0:12:16.160 --> 0:12:19.439 going to an integrated school, which in itself in Austria 0:12:19.480 --> 0:12:21.040 is a pretty new thing. That like you would have 0:12:21.120 --> 0:12:24.440 Jewish and Christian boys at the same school. There were 0:12:24.480 --> 0:12:27.360 some like you have religious education as part of your 0:12:27.360 --> 0:12:30.080 normal schooling. Obviously, the small number of Jewish kids have 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:32.640 a rabbi. Most of the other boys are being talked 0:12:32.679 --> 0:12:35.079 to by like members of the Catholic clergy because it's 0:12:35.080 --> 0:12:39.480 a majority Catholic country. Bruno would later describe most of 0:12:39.520 --> 0:12:42.880 his fellow classmates as anti Semitic bastards, which is almost 0:12:42.880 --> 0:12:44.280 certainly accurate. 0:12:46.360 --> 0:12:46.960 Austria. 0:12:47.080 --> 0:12:51.920 And yeah, yeah, probably kinds of racism that you would 0:12:52.000 --> 0:12:57.680 need like a NASA calculator to rate today. He recalled 0:12:57.720 --> 0:13:00.000 often the case of a classmate who he had consented 0:13:00.160 --> 0:13:02.720 ORed a friend and walked to school with daily, who 0:13:02.760 --> 0:13:05.280 out of nowhere one morning, punched him in the face 0:13:05.360 --> 0:13:09.040 in revenge for the crucifixion of Christ. So that kind 0:13:09.040 --> 0:13:13.280 of racism. Yeah, your best friend just hits you one 0:13:13.320 --> 0:13:15.640 day because of something that happened two thousand years ago. 0:13:17.000 --> 0:13:19.000 But it does like bring up this thing that I 0:13:19.000 --> 0:13:22.040 think is happening now, where like these kids will just 0:13:22.080 --> 0:13:23.720 be friends with kids, but then they go home and 0:13:23.760 --> 0:13:27.240 their parents tell them things and then suddenly they're acting 0:13:27.280 --> 0:13:29.960 out and they're deciding this is someone needs to be 0:13:30.000 --> 0:13:30.760 punched in the face. 0:13:30.880 --> 0:13:32.640 I guess I need to be a huge asshole now, 0:13:32.720 --> 0:13:34.559 Okay he. 0:13:34.559 --> 0:13:36.240 Learned that somewhere that day. 0:13:36.120 --> 0:13:38.440 Before, right, Yeah, that kid didn't come up with the 0:13:38.520 --> 0:13:40.760 idea on his own. It was a parent or like 0:13:40.800 --> 0:13:43.280 probably a member of the Catholic clergy who was talking 0:13:43.360 --> 0:13:46.960 shit one day. Now, this was the tip of the 0:13:47.000 --> 0:13:49.679 iceberg in terms of the racism that Bruno endured as 0:13:49.679 --> 0:13:52.080 a kid. He would later say, quote, there were the 0:13:52.120 --> 0:13:54.520 boys who extorted money, who beat us if we handed 0:13:54.520 --> 0:13:56.800 it over because we were dirty cowards, and who beat 0:13:56.880 --> 0:13:59.200 us if we didn't because we were miser le Jews. 0:13:59.240 --> 0:14:03.200 So really can't win, you know. One of the key 0:14:03.240 --> 0:14:05.679 moments of Bruno's education came when he and several other 0:14:05.800 --> 0:14:09.920 boys attacked one of their school teachers, again very different era, 0:14:10.600 --> 0:14:13.720 who he described later as a simpering fool who spoke 0:14:13.800 --> 0:14:14.920 with the voice of a eunuch. 0:14:15.080 --> 0:14:15.200 Right. 0:14:15.320 --> 0:14:18.160 In other words, he and a bunch of his other 0:14:18.240 --> 0:14:20.520 students beat the hell out of a school teacher because 0:14:20.520 --> 0:14:24.120 he was a feminate, you know. In the Creation of 0:14:24.200 --> 0:14:27.760 Doctor b a biography by Richard Pollock, Pollock rights, so 0:14:27.880 --> 0:14:30.600 weak and inadequate was the schoolmaster that one day Bruno 0:14:30.640 --> 0:14:33.240 egged on several of his classmates and together they bodily 0:14:33.280 --> 0:14:36.560 removed the offending instructor from the room. Bettelheim recalled that 0:14:36.600 --> 0:14:39.560 he immediately began to tremble as he contemplated the consequences 0:14:39.600 --> 0:14:41.800 of this rash act, and indeed, the next day the 0:14:41.800 --> 0:14:46.080 schools authoritarian director castigated the class and especially Bruno, as 0:14:46.120 --> 0:14:49.960 the leader in this unprecedented and nefarious deed. But the 0:14:50.000 --> 0:14:52.560 director did not as the troublemaker feared, expel him. On 0:14:52.600 --> 0:14:54.600 the contrary, at the end of the scolding, his demeanor 0:14:54.640 --> 0:14:57.960 suddenly softened, and in a quiet voice, he said, of course, 0:14:58.000 --> 0:15:00.560 I know that if doctor X had behaved as I 0:15:00.600 --> 0:15:03.680 expect all masters of this institution to behave, nothing like 0:15:03.720 --> 0:15:07.440 this could have happened. So again, he like beats up 0:15:07.480 --> 0:15:09.800 a teacher, he like leads a mob to force a 0:15:09.880 --> 0:15:12.040 teacher violently out of the classroom. And the director's like, 0:15:12.240 --> 0:15:13.880 we yeah, but he shouldn't have been such a girl 0:15:13.920 --> 0:15:15.400 about it. 0:15:14.560 --> 0:15:19.240 He was asking for it. And then we. 0:15:19.280 --> 0:15:21.520 Wonder, like, oh, how did this guy then go on 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:22.760 to perpetuate harm? 0:15:22.800 --> 0:15:26.880 Pardiculuses, Yeah, why was this guy a problem later in life? 0:15:27.400 --> 0:15:28.440 Well, and it's also. 0:15:28.280 --> 0:15:31.120 White in Austria get involved in so much fucked up shit, 0:15:31.320 --> 0:15:34.160 you know. It really like the fact that this is 0:15:34.200 --> 0:15:37.360 the country that is going to like produce Hitler and 0:15:37.360 --> 0:15:39.600 that just like gets does the things it does in 0:15:39.640 --> 0:15:43.080 World War One, it's like, oh yeah, everybody was like 0:15:43.080 --> 0:15:45.160 like this. This is a culture that's kind of out 0:15:45.200 --> 0:15:46.600 of its mind in a lot of ways. 0:15:46.640 --> 0:15:49.160 You know, I can't living in one of those. 0:15:49.240 --> 0:15:50.600 No, no, no, no, no. Thank god. 0:15:50.640 --> 0:15:54.480 We figured it fixed all of our mental health issues. Finally, 0:15:54.560 --> 0:15:57.880 human beings are healthy. I haven't read the news in 0:15:57.920 --> 0:16:02.040 about eight years, but I think it's going well. So 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:05.000 more than two thirds of a century later, Bruno would 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:08.520 recall this incident as key in his development as an educator, 0:16:08.560 --> 0:16:10.840 because it was the first time a figure of authority 0:16:10.880 --> 0:16:14.520 at his school had witnessed bad behavior and, in his eyes, 0:16:14.800 --> 0:16:18.040 sought to understand its root cause rather than just punishing 0:16:18.120 --> 0:16:20.080 it out right. So what he takes from this is 0:16:21.000 --> 0:16:23.600 my headmaster punished me, because he does get punished, but 0:16:23.680 --> 0:16:27.560 he sought to understand why I had acted out. And 0:16:27.600 --> 0:16:29.520 this is like a revelation to him that you wouldn't 0:16:29.520 --> 0:16:31.360 just hit a kid for not doing what you wanted 0:16:31.360 --> 0:16:33.400 a kid to do. You would try to understand what 0:16:33.560 --> 0:16:36.920 was the child thinking when it behaved When they behaved badly, right, 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:38.520 and then you hit him, and then you hit him 0:16:38.560 --> 0:16:41.840 and then you hit me. Now, the fact that Bruno 0:16:41.920 --> 0:16:44.440 just chose to describe the teacher he disliked as sounding 0:16:44.560 --> 0:16:46.840 like a eunuch holds a little more meaning than you 0:16:46.960 --> 0:16:50.480 might guess. As an adult, Bruno reserved special disgust for 0:16:50.520 --> 0:16:53.240 the authority figures of his childhood who acted in ways 0:16:53.280 --> 0:16:56.640 he considered effeminate, and his kind and retiring father was 0:16:56.680 --> 0:16:59.400 one of these, and an excellent paper on Bettelheim for 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:03.120 Disability Studies Quarterly Griffin Epstein seems to tie this behavior 0:17:03.120 --> 0:17:07.080 to Bruno's insecurity over anti Semitism. There was a strong 0:17:07.160 --> 0:17:11.159 heteropatriarchal thrust to the stigmatization of Jews. According to Boyarin, 0:17:11.440 --> 0:17:15.120 Jews were understood to defy Western European gender and sexual norms. 0:17:15.320 --> 0:17:18.119 Jewish men were seen as effeminate sissies unfit for labor, 0:17:18.119 --> 0:17:20.960 while Jewish women, when they appeared discursively at all, were 0:17:21.000 --> 0:17:25.280 read as phallic monsters. Jews were perceived broadly as deviant, perverse, 0:17:25.320 --> 0:17:31.280 and inbred sexual aberrations. So Bruno is really really sensitive 0:17:31.400 --> 0:17:34.119 about the idea of men not behaving in a masculine 0:17:34.160 --> 0:17:37.960 way because of the racism that he encounters right, and 0:17:38.359 --> 0:17:40.680 this is further complicated by the fact that his dad 0:17:40.760 --> 0:17:44.840 catches syphilis. In nineteen oh seven. So this idea and 0:17:45.320 --> 0:17:51.399 another anti Semites will often link syphilis to Judaism in 0:17:51.400 --> 0:17:55.960 this period, like it is a common aspect of racial politics. 0:17:56.040 --> 0:17:58.199 Hitler does it a lot. And so the fact that 0:17:58.240 --> 0:18:02.240 Bruno's dad, as kind as he is, catches this very 0:18:02.320 --> 0:18:06.760 shameful disease is a big part of why Bruno is 0:18:06.840 --> 0:18:09.760 going to be the way he is as an adult. 0:18:09.800 --> 0:18:11.840 And it's like this kind of shame that is at 0:18:11.880 --> 0:18:15.040 the core of his personality as a kid. Now, the 0:18:15.359 --> 0:18:19.040 likely reason Anton catches syphilis is that his wife goes 0:18:19.080 --> 0:18:22.240 away one weekend and he sleeps with a sex worker. Right, 0:18:23.080 --> 0:18:26.159 That's generally how this thing happened. This was apparently the 0:18:26.160 --> 0:18:29.359 only time he did it, although obviously we can't know that, 0:18:30.240 --> 0:18:33.119 but the indiscretion has a shattering impact on the family. 0:18:33.200 --> 0:18:35.320 His wife doesn't sleep with him for the last twenty 0:18:35.400 --> 0:18:38.359 years of their marriage, and she doesn't because she would 0:18:38.359 --> 0:18:41.000 get sick and die if she did, right, Like, this 0:18:41.119 --> 0:18:44.199 is an uncurable fatal illness in addition to being a 0:18:44.240 --> 0:18:45.440 stigmatized illness. 0:18:45.800 --> 0:18:48.840 So word Jilif for twenty years with syphilis. 0:18:48.640 --> 0:18:51.159 You do you off. And it takes about twenty fifteen 0:18:51.200 --> 0:18:53.879 to twenty years to hit like the tertiary stages, Like 0:18:53.960 --> 0:18:58.000 that's not it can it can go differently. But like, 0:18:58.240 --> 0:19:01.240 one of the frightening things about syphilis is that you 0:19:01.760 --> 0:19:04.439 after the quote unquote indiscretion as it would be, you 0:19:04.440 --> 0:19:06.440 know you, so you have a break in your and 0:19:06.480 --> 0:19:10.479 you and you you know, have an unrecommended liaison, you 0:19:10.520 --> 0:19:13.000 don't know for years if you got sick from it, right, 0:19:13.480 --> 0:19:15.560 And that's part of why this is such a massive 0:19:15.640 --> 0:19:18.639 thing in Austrian culture and all in all European culture 0:19:18.640 --> 0:19:22.359 in this period, is that like the entire all the 0:19:22.440 --> 0:19:25.320 men in the in the society are like constantly scared 0:19:25.320 --> 0:19:27.560 of getting syphilis, right, and so are their wives, because 0:19:27.560 --> 0:19:29.719 if your husband is sleeping around and he catches it, 0:19:29.960 --> 0:19:30.520 you'll get it. 0:19:30.600 --> 0:19:30.800 You know. 0:19:31.400 --> 0:19:33.640 One of the movies that shaped me so much as 0:19:33.680 --> 0:19:34.200 a kid. 0:19:34.320 --> 0:19:39.320 Was this this movie called She's Too Young on Lifetime. 0:19:39.520 --> 0:19:43.240 Oh god, that was about alis outbreak at a high school. 0:19:43.359 --> 0:19:44.880 Oh my god, it was. 0:19:45.200 --> 0:19:47.440 Look, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. 0:19:47.520 --> 0:19:50.679 Not that syphilis is funny, but Lifetime's execution of the 0:19:50.720 --> 0:19:51.960 hit film She's Too Young. 0:19:52.119 --> 0:19:55.920 She's Too Young, a Lifetime movie about syphilis at high 0:19:55.960 --> 0:19:59.440 school does sound pretty rad, but also. 0:19:59.240 --> 0:20:02.000 Like it's funny because at that point you just get 0:20:02.000 --> 0:20:05.600 a shot like it's not the same because it was 0:20:05.680 --> 0:20:08.760 for them, you know, yeah. 0:20:08.040 --> 0:20:10.440