NOW in his 80th year, Bruno Bettelheim has spent more than half of his life in the United States. He arrived here in 1939 after a year in Dachau and Buchenwald, and this book contains an expression of his gratitude to his second country. His work as director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, where he devoted himself to autistic children, as well as his books on children and other matters, has earned him the deep respect of his contemporaries. Yet this is the book of an exile, and its most potent, though tacit, theme is nostalgia for the Vienna of his early life.

He was born there in 1903 into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family, about half a century after Freud, whose origins were very similar; and Dr. Bettelheim says that the culture in which he was reared had not changed very much. From 1920 on he read Freud's books as they appeared. He studied psychoanalysis and was analyzed in Freud's Vienna. The Gymnasium he attended still had the traditional humanistic curriculum, emphasizing Greek and Latin. Most important of all, he shared Freud's language. Obviously Mr. Bettelheim can claim a degree of intimacy with the thought and the culture of Freud that few living people can match.
Text:

It is clear that on arrival in the United States Dr. Bettelheim suffered some culture shock. Americans, he discovered, had very little understanding of Freud. They had converted psychoanalysis into a medical specialty, making it, in Freud's own words, ''a mere housemaid of Psychiatry.'' They were not educated in the classics and had little contact with culture as Freud understood it. Not to know the story of Oedipus is to miss the point of Freud's central doctrine; not to know the legend of Cupid and Psyche is to misunderstand the very term ''psychoanalysis.'' Worse still, Americans were unfamiliar with the German distinction between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit (Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften) and so could not see that psychoanalysis belonged to the latter. Hence the un-Freudian emphasis on cure and on adjustment or adaptation to society; in these, the great objects of American psychoanalysis, neither Freud nor Dr. Bettelheim has any interest.

Dr. Bettelheim says little of the other national schools of analysis, though Jacques Lacan, for example, agreed with him about the unimportance of cure and the British school differs considerably from the vacuously optimistic American school (as he sees it). And, of course, it is America he has in mind when he says that a failure to understand the tragic aspect of Freud's thought has allowed the growth of an intolerably vulgar Freudianism that supports the notion that ''unrestrained letting-go'' and ''letting it all hang out'' is proper conduct on all occasions and not just on the couch. Like Freud himself, Dr. Bettelheim thinks that psychoanalysis met much less resistance here than elsewhere and that the reasons for this were incomprehension or shallowness of response.

One important reason for this failure was the general inability of Americans to read Freud in German, a second that the translations meant to ease this problem were unsatisfactory. It may surprise readers of the ''Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud'' to find that its chief editor, James Strachey, and his collaborators (including his co-editor, Anna Freud) are here made responsible for the failure of American psychoanalysis. Yet Strachey knew Freud and was not prone to vulgar error. Dr. Bettelheim's suggestion that he ought to have made it his responsibility to tell ignorant readers the story of Oedipus or of Psyche is very odd, for Strachey could no more have supposed his readers to be in need of such help than Freud himself did. As Dr. Bettelheim's book progresses, his condemnations of Strachey grow even stronger. At first he says only this: ''I do not doubt that Freud's English translators wanted to present his writings to their audience as accurately as possible.'' But 60 pages on they are accused of using various devices to make it ''difficult to gain an understanding of what (Freud) had in mind'' and of finding ''subtle ways of putting a distance between him and the reader.'' In short, they distorted Freud on purpose.

No one, I daresay, would want to maintain that the ''Standard Edition'' doesn't need some revision. It would be astonishing if it didn't. But the implication -or charge - of deliberate distortion is surely absurd. It may be true that the translators ''cleave to an early stage of Freud's thought, in which he inclined to science and medicine'' - just as it is true that Dr. Bettelheim cleaves to ''the more mature Freud, whose orientation was humanistic.'' Indeed, it might be thought that Dr. Bettelheim, though he gives a persuasive account of Freud's progressive abandonment of his medical attitudes, somewhat exaggerates Freud's independence of them. But in any case Strachey & Company were translating the whole of Freud, early and late. Some of the passages of which Dr. Bettelheim complains may be too medical in tone, but some can be defended. He scores some hits, as might be expected, but fewer than he thinks.

In any translation there is a drift away from the tone and even the sense of the original, and this drift is likely to be stronger when the text is treasured by an institution that is split by doctrinal and national disagreement; as in theology, key terms acquire incompatible definitions. Moreover, the German language has the trick of making up new terms out of its own substance; lacking this capability, English has usually resorted to neologisms made from Greek and Latin roots. To Dr. Bettelheim such words look affectedly learned, and sometimes they are. Strachey should not have translated ''Mutterleib'' as ''uterus''; ''womb'' is better. ''Unheil'' is not ''trouble'' but ''disaster.'' ''Masse'' doesn't mean ''group'' -it simply means ''mass'' - and so an important book, ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' has a mistranslated title. Worse still, ''Trieb'' does not mean ''instinct''; Strachey hesitated over the word, disliking ''drive,'' but he should have seen that ''instinct'' was worse. ''Triebe und Triebschicksale'' simply doesn't mean ''Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,'' though Dr. Bettelheim's ''Drives and Their Mutability'' is only slightly better. Perhaps ''Drives and Their Vicissitudes'' would be the best compromise.

He insists that Freud was always trying to avoid technical words, so that it is a distortion to make him sound technical in a translation. For example, ''Besetzung,'' which means ''occupation'' or ''investment'' or ''filling'' in ordinary German, is translated as ''cathexis.'' But granted the English habit of making up words from Greek, ''cathexis'' means ''occupation,'' in what is obviously a special sense. And it must surely have a special sense in Freud. He also uses ''Uberbesetzung''; not, I am told, a common word. Is ''hypercathexis'' really more bizarre than ''over-occupation'' or ''upper-occupation''?

ASIMILAR point arises with Freud's word ''Fehlleistung,'' a combination of two ordinary words that means something like ''faulty achievement.'' Freud used it (pace Dr. Bettelheim) as a technical term, covering acts or speech-acts in which the unconscious enters to prevent our doing what we set out to achieve. Strachey translated ''Fehlleistung'' as ''parapraxis,'' which is rather brilliant and conveys the sense of Freud's word better than the clumsy circumlocution that would have otherwise been necessary. Dr. Bettelheim says he has never heard anybody say ''parapraxis,'' which is odd, since I hear the word often and use it myself. It might be thought of as Strachey's little contribution to the tradition of classical culture in which Dr. Bettelheim wishes we were educated. But such praise is not to be expected here. Strachey is even blamed for translating ''Versprechen'' as ''slips of the tongue,'' though it is an expression far older than Freud and an exact equivalent of the Latin ''lapsus linguae,'' which Freud himself could have used. Dr. Bettelheim says fancifully that Strachey was making the tongue responsible for the error, which is simply to misread the idiom.

Too often his notion of the range of senses of an English word seems to have been determined by looking it up in a short dictionary. He supposes, for instance, that ''anatomy'' (used to translate ''Zerlegung'') has no use outside the biological sciences and must reflect a predilection for medical terms. Ignoring the complex history of the word ''association'' in English philosophy and poetry, he declares that it must refer to ''a conscious process, deliberately engaged in,'' so that ''free association'' is a false translation of ''Einfall.'' And so on.

But the substance of Dr. Bettelheim's complaint is suggested by his book's title. Freud used the word ''Seele'' very freely: ''A dream is the result of the activity of our own soul''; ''the structure of the soul''; ''the life of the soul.'' Strachey avoided the word, always translating it as ''mind'' and ''Seelische'' as ''mental.'' He must have known that this was inaccurate; his problem, as usual, was the different semantic range of the words ''Seele'' and ''soul.'' It would be disastrous to say in English ''psychoanalysis is a part of psychology which is dedicated to the science of the soul''; Strachey said ''part of the mental science of psychology,'' which is bad but lacks the religious, or religiose, overtones of the more literal version. Perhaps he should have used ''psyche'' and ''psychic,'' but there are obvious dangers in those words too. Dr. Bettelheim's observations are here more justifiable, but perhaps he should address his complaints to Babel rather than to Strachey; some of these problems are inherent in the diversity of languages and cultures.

THE same may be said of his strictures on the words ''ego,'' ''id'' and ''superego.'' The true equivalents of Freud's ''Ich,'' ''Es'' and ''Uber-Ich'' are ''I,'' ''it'' and ''over-I'' or ''upper-I.'' Dr. Bettelheim points out that in German the word for child is neuter (''das Kind''), so that children are used to being referred to as ''it'' during their earliest years; consequently, Germans would be comfortable with a neuter word for aggressive and asocial impulses. But if Strachey had decided against his Latin technicalities and used ''it,'' he could not in any case have saved that important childhood association. When Georg Groddeck's translator translates ''Es'' as ''it,'' we find it no less odd, I think. And we should surely be glad not to have to talk about the ''upper-I.'' Moreover, ''ego'' has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, a use quite independent of the pejorative senses Dr. Bettelheim takes to be unavoidable.

None of this means that Dr. Bettelheim is wrong in claiming that it would be better to read Freud in German, and better still to do so in Vienna, and best of all to do so 60 years ago. It is salutary to have instruction in what we have lost. But on the evidence here presented, he has treated rather harshly a huge labor of translation, carried out with devotion and skill, and has unfairly visited the failings of American psychoanalytic practice on that translation. When that is said, we can sympathize very sincerely with this remarkable man as he looks back after a lifetime of achievement in an alien culture and an alien language to the happiness and security of the Gymnasium, the city and the language of his youth.