Book Review: Love Is Not Enough

Title: Love Is Not Enough

Author: Bruno Bettelheim

Date: 1950

Publisher: The Free Press

ISBN: none

Length: 375 pages plus 10-page index and photo inserts

Illustrations: black-and-white photographs

Quote: "Through this book-length discussion of how we handle everyday happenings with the child as they occur...we hope to sow some of the things that are needed in addition to love."

Bruno Bettelheim was one of the few people of whom it's reasonable to say that terrible things that happened to him led to good results. Most famously, he used the time he spent as a prisoner in Dachau to demonstrate that imagination and creativity actually protected sanity, rather than seducing people into schizophrenia (a serious fear at the time). If you're a young person who grew up in a world where "everyone knew" that, because schizophrenia is a physical disease of the brain whose initial symptoms can resemble being lost in daydreams, daydreams "cause" schizophrenia (in exactly the same way masturbation "caused" STD's), then you may not appreciate Bettelheim's contribution to the world as much as people my age have reason to do. Personally I think he should have been knighted.

Among his other contributions to the world, Bettelheim served for several years as the head psychologist in charge of a school for mentally ill children. The definition of mental illness has always been blurry. Bettelheim attempted to "school" little patients of all kinds. Love Is Not Enough is his memoir of the first few years at this school and what seemed to help the "students."

Part of the interest Love Is Not Enough offers to readers today is the question of what exactly was wrong with these children, and how many of them would be classified as mentally ill today. One of them was clearly working through emotional problems caused by a life-threatening physical disease. Several sound as if they'd been sexually abused; Bettelheim even tells us precisely how one child's mother had admitted using the child as a prop in the seduction routine she used as a prostitute.

Bettelheim's use of the term "autistic" could cause some confusion. As the text makes clear, if his school ever accepted an autistic child, he didn't write about it. In 1950 "autistic" was used as a technical term describing behavior used by people (with relatively normal mental function) to exclude others, or show that the person was deliberately ignoring others. In 1950 the technical term for autistic children was "idiots," so it could have been worse; to those in need of a more disturbing term than "rude," "hostile," or "obnoxious" to apply to someone who makes it clear that he's ignoring the speaker, the temptation to classify behavior of this kind as "idiotic" must have been strong. The children Bettelheim describes were obviously capable of observing, listening, and talking to other people, but some of them had learned that really ignoring an adult can cause amusingly irrational behavior in susceptible adults.

Did any of Bettelheim's students really have a genuine brain disorder? Bettelheim had no way of knowing. Did they actually achieve recovery or remission from impending psychiatric illnesses? This may never be known. Did they at least make a partial compensation for diseases that were going to become more disabling as they grew up? This may never be known either. All Bettelheim could say was that his school's policy of near-total indulgence seemed to help those of the students who will seem, to present-time readers, as if they were going to work through their traumas and grow up more or less normal anyway.

This book is not recommended to most parents of young children; by now we know some of the dangers of the indulgent style of parenting. It may be helpful to either adults or children who are coping with post-traumatic stress issues, but it is not as promising an approach to parenting or teaching, in general, as some of Bettelheim's original readers hoped. Love Is Not Enough is definitely not recommended for reading at home if you live with children. It is, however, an interesting piece of history.

Here, once again, we have a book that's unlikely to be republished and, for that reason, is going into the collector price range. To buy it here, send $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address from the very bottom of the screen; you could fit another book of this size, and maybe another long thin book such as a coloring book, into that $5 package.