Bruno Bettelheim Quotes
What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their ownback; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.
Bettelheim, Bruno. A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, p. 117.
Effective, terse quotation illustrating the research findings that adults who were abused as children tend to become child abusers themselves. Although he was referring to Black parents, the findings have been borne out for all ethnic groups.
This is the Admiral who commanded that invasion of Washington DC and the burning of the White House. It was in retaliation for the destruction of buildings in the American invasion of Canada that began the War of 1812.
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and author who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.
