Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School

#98
Title: Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School
Author: Stephen Eliot
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Year: 2002
Genre: memoir, psychology, education
309 pages A memoir by a very long-term resident and student of Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at University of Chicago. Eliot reports that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia; it's always hard to form an impression from edited discourse, but my understanding of his description of himself is more in accord with a classic Kernbergian borderline diagnosis (for Kernberg, this meant "borderline psychotic," not today's "borderline personality disorder"), moving, as Kohlberg suggested, into a better-compensated narcissism.

Eliot does not tell his story coherently, and the jumps in time frame do not appear to be intentional or to contribute to the narrative as a deliberate structural feature. One can understand this storytelling failure as indicative of the author's ongoing difficulties with empathy and preoccupation with his internal state, but that is supposition on my part. Eliot's tale reflects, and states, his profoundly ambivalent relationship with and evaluation of Bettleheim, but, like much of the book, the reader is left with an experience of having been told something rather than having been shown it. It's hard to enter Eliot's world. That may be a lot of the problem.

For a more accessible story about schools that are also treatment settings for kids with profound needs, read Nazeer's Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism. Pair Eliot with One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (the book with the Chief as narrator, not the film) and the excellent documentary on Bettelheim and the practice of blaming mothers for their children's autism, Refrigerator Mothers.