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“... It is difficult to know how Bruno Bettelheim would wish this book to be read. Part memoir, part popular introduction to psychoanalysis, and part scholarly interpretation and vindication of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, it raises many questions that are crucial to our understanding of Freud’s work. Bettelheim wants to undermine the scientific reading of Freud in favour of a humanistic reading ...”

“... Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss; American psychoanalysis without Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim or Heinz Hartmann; American publishing without Kurt Wolff or Theodore Schocken; architecture without Walter Gropius; art history without Erwin Panofsky; mathematics without Kurt Gödel; physics without Enrico Fermi – and the list goes on ...”

“... and so forth, to reveal how mutable they are and how adaptable to social manipulation. Where Bruno Bettelheim believes that the motif of the lost mother and wicked stepmother is an example of fairytales’ timeless and therapeutic wisdom, providing children with images of their parents’ benign and menacing aspects, Warner suggests that this motif ...”

“... in books; and what was known of them in official circles seems to have made little impression. Bruno Bettelheim tells us that from 1939 to 1942 it was impossible to get the camps and the SS taken seriously. Bettelheim was imprisoned before the war in Dachau and Buchenwald, and has given his story in The Informed ...”

“... fairy tales and folk narratives of death. Kselman draws on the ‘hermeneutic vocabularies’ of Bruno Bettelheim, Lévi-Strauss and others, but by pledging allegiance to no single theory he avoids the pitfalls of reductionism. Most impressively, he listens to the storytellers and captures the eloquence, cleverness and fatalism of popular tales. The ...”

“... you wore: Buchenwald was the continuation of total war by other means, although as Heimler – and Bruno Bettelheim – discovered, cunning, moral fibre or luck could always raise you into a life expectation not shared by the rest of your group. Semprun’s untidy, repetitive, but refreshingly combative book about Buchenwald also exemplifies a belief of ...”

“... which diffuse the sense of dange’ and guilt (a bit like contemporary self-help support groups). Bruno Bettelheim noted (in The Uses of Enchantment) the comfort that even a solitary telling can bring to a child who realises that other people have told and heard the tale and, presumably, have also experienced the threatening fantasies. When Warner tells ...”

“... the boats are being built. This illustration is the only thing I can remember from a lecture by Bruno Bettelheim which I heard in 1975. It struck me at the time because I had just finished a year at an American university, where I had sometimes had the impression that knowledge was understood to be palpable stuff which it was the duty of learning to ...”

“... brilliantly, interminably, unstoppably (until someone physically interrupted and stopped him). Bruno Bettelheim had whispered to me: ‘He’s a megalomaniac.’ I was surprised at the word then, and didn’t want to think of it now in connection with this other brilliant, charming man. I preferred to think of the occasional inability of Schubert to ...”

“... case of full-sized dwarfs or midgets, two or three feet, which is the usual range in real life. Bruno Bettelheim, whose book on fairy-tales reads like the work of a Laputan philosopher, says dwarfs symbolise a phallic existence. It’s lucky that he didn’t take in Lilliputians, whose size is actually that of a human phallus, for he would have been ...”

“... the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of Kafka, Joyce, Flaubert and Hemingway he assembles what amount to ...”

“... the astronomer Francis Wollaston was to say of him. Both books also rightly flay the writings of Bruno Bettelheim, the mid-century psychoanalytic huckster (he called himself ‘doctor’ but had neither a medical degree nor any training in clinical psychology) who got famous by popularising the idea that autism was caused by emotionally frigid ...”

“... which alone would keep the personality intact and flexible enough to make it a going concern.’ (Bruno Bettelheim, whose work does not seem to have impinged on Erikson’s at all, had the same uneasy reaction to the polite, well-adjusted kibbutzniks he studied for The Children of the Dream.) ‘Reflections on American Identity’, read together with ...”

“... Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the entire topic had been declared out of bounds, as if it were ‘unthinkable’. Such a state of affairs is profoundly ...”

“... Freud humane will be displeased. It’s not just a matter of the material chosen. As Philip Rieff, Bruno Bettelheim and others have complained, the Standard Edition’s prickly jargon – its ego and id for das Ich and das Es, its ‘cathexis’ and ‘scopophilia’ – removes psychoanalysis from the Geisteswissenschaften. Yet Strachey’s translation ...”