Books like The Informed Heart

This is an incredibly difficult book to rate and review. Bruno Bettelheim was another one of those crazy-Austrian-pyschologist-types like Siggy Freud, but Bettelheim's focus was primarily on child psychology. There's a lot of debate about his early theories on autism - his belief was that autism is not organic but actually occurs due to a mother's coldness towards the child, "refrigerator mother". That's hard for me to stomach and I want to throw really large objects on Bettelheim's corpse, but remind myself that this work of his was done in the early-mid 20th-C, and true understanding and awareness of autism is relatively new. Research is finding new things all the time, so. Okay. I'll cut Bettelheim a little slack for being a product of his generation and culture.(This does not excuse his alleged views on corporal punishment of children.)Alright, so Bettelheim was probably a douche. Putting that aside, however, I've enjoyed things I've read by him on the topic of fairy tales and fables (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales) and have found I've been interested in other things he proposed, even if I haven't fully agreed with him.My interest in The Informed Heart was piqued by references to it in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in regards to autonomy. The passages Friedan discussed were about Bettelheim's time spent in a concentration camp, and an experience he witnessed of a woman who was a previous dancer before she was sent to the camp. A guard discovered she was a dancer and made her dance for him; she danced right up to him, took his gun and shot him. She, in turn, was gunned down by other guards, but the point Bettelheim was making (that Friedan included in her own work as an illustration) was that as soon as the woman was given a chance to live, even minutely, in a manner that she had previously allowed her to feel free and secure and self-confident. She likely knew she was going to die by her actions but that didn't matter. She had autonomy.Pretty heady stuff.Bettelheim covers a lot of ground in The Informed Heart, from the dangers of advancement of technology to his experiences in the concentration camp. Out of context it's hard to see how the two would really work side-by-side, but Bettelheim made it work. I was reminded often of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and his work with logotherapy, essentially the belief that searching for one's meaning and place in life is the driving force behind one's actions. Bettelheim's discussion on autonomy isn't all that different from Frankl's logotherapy, but reading Bettelheim made me want to re-read Frankl again. I feel what Frankl said was better and made more of an impact on me. Plus, Frankl said it first. I think Bettelheim could just have said, "Yeah, what [Frankl] said!"; instead he wrote a 300+ page book about his own views that sort of meandered a bit.Of most interest was his views on why concentration camp members did not often commit suicide even when they understood their fate. I won't give it away here, I do recommend a good read of The Informed Heart. I was also interested in what Bettelheim had to say about Anne Frank and her family, and how their death was quite senseless - had they not been as concerned with staying together as a family unit and focusing on bringing their belongings into hiding with them, they may have had a chance of survival. According to Bettelheim, it was their desire to remain together that was their undoing.Food for thought, in any case.Overall this was an interesting read, even when I may not have agreed with Bettelheim's opinions. This was often a difficult read because of the information he shared about his time in the camp, and I often had to put the book down and not read it all at once.