Welcome to Spock Talk! The podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

We’re talking Spock because we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is the Spock brand around, twenty-five years after Dr. Spock died?

In this episode of Spock Talk, we’re going to cover how Dr. Benjamin Spock’s sneakily introduced psychoanalytic concepts to the American public.

But first, we’re going to talk about how the Rockefeller Foundation primed the conditions for Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care to be a once-in-a-century sensation.

Psychology and child rearing

I want to talk a little bit about how psychology was used as a tool. For social control. So, relative to other academic disciplines, in the early twentieth century, psychology was fresh, new, and fashionable. 

For example, Virginia Woolf and her modernist contemporaries were including references to Freud in literature because it was new and popular and the thing to do.

on symbolism of To the Lighthouse I’m embarrassed to say I cannot complete this riff because I have never read it! Go on, mock me. Call me out on my ersatz intellectualism! Will you allow me to guess? Is the lighthouse a penis?

And this is semi-related to our last episode. We talked about how, in this time period, there was a great deal of interest in using science--loosely defined--to improve--loosely defined--society. There were folks who saw potential for psychology solve social problems like poverty. 

And there was a grand American tradition of the wealthy elite using their money and influence in a paternalistic way. Like, the Carnegie libraries, for example. I think the general perception of Carnegie libraries is, oh, great! This obscenely rich guy built all of these cute little libraries so people could read books. Wasn’t that nice! And generous! But the true motivation was a bit more, let’s say, economically motivated than that. Carnegie thought that if the hoi polloi, the working class, could have access to knowledge, in the same way that rich people had access to knowledge, society would have a better workforce. Which is…right. But it’s not this altruistic thing.

Right. And this goes on even now with so-called corporate responsibility initiatives. Is it bad that a giant corporation wants to fund the pool renovations at a local community center? No! Of course not! Summer is coming, and people need that pool! But it’s not an entirely altruistic act for the corporation to want to be seen as contributing positively to its workers’ communities in this way. It improves their image and helps paper over minor complaints from the workforce.

Related. Have you heard of the Rockefellers?

 As someone who dwells on a coast - but don’t worry, not one of the elite ones - I am familiar with how they cook oysters. And that John D Rockefeller was some sort of titan of industry in the…early 1900s? That’s honestly all I’ve got.

In the 1920s, The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation spent millions of dollars to try and standardize child raising. By setting up centers and universities that would “train home economists and teachers to be ‘parent educators’” (Ehrenreich, p. 208). They took psychological theories and distilled them into pamphlets for mothers.

And, in creating this parent education movement, the Rockefeller foundation also, at the same time, created demand for parenting education. And the precedent for infusing psychology into parenting literature.

So, Spock was not the first author to sneak psychology into parenting education literature, but his book became very mainstream and widely read.

How does this happen? 

Jane, Spock’s first wife, is the family member who first got into psychoanalysis. Jane developed an  interest in psychology as a student at Bryn Mawr college. And then she worked for a guy named Dr. George Draper, taking patient medical histories for his research. Dr. Draper encouraged Jane to get psychoanalyzed. Which seems like a weird thing for a boss to recommend.

I cannot hear this story without remembering that episode of Mad Men where Betty Draper’s psychiatrist called her husband Don to discuss her sessions. Please tell me this analyst wasn’t reporting back to Dr. Draper or Dr. Spock!

Psychoanalysis was a really distressing process for Jane because it brought up all of these painful childhood memories. Her father, shamefully, died of syphilis when she was 13 years old, but before that he was psychotic and verbally abusive, because that’s what happened to people who had syphilis before antibiotics. (Maier, p. 78).

Sometimes you include little suggestions for what I can interject, and I can’t help but note for our listeners that here is the part where you really wanted me to bring out all my syphilis jokes. And I hate to fail you twice in one episode after that To the Lighthouse debacle, but…

Both of the young Spock’s, Ben and Jane, were into psychology. 

After Spock’s pediatrics residency in 1931, he completed another residency in psychiatry, at the Payne Whitney Clinic at the New York Hospital-Cornell, but was discouraged because he had very few pediatric patients. There, he observed that the best staff “were those who had had Freudian psychoanalytic training” (Spock on Spock, p. 103)

And in 1932, when he tried to get his pediatric practice going, and he realized that there was no psychological training for pediatricians in New York. No one blended these specialities. 

Which Spock saw as an opportunity. A selling point, because the parents in his socioeconomic sphere read about psychology in popular magazines, and if he trained in both disciplines, that would help him distinguish himself. (Maier, p. 92).

He eventually got board certified in pediatrics, but not in psychiatry.

In 1933 as a student at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute he underwent a year of psychoanalysis with Bertram Lewin and five years of seminars, two a week.” In his memoir, he wrote about how he, “I complained endlessly about my mother’s criticalness and domination for several months” (Spock on Spock, p. 5).

It was a rush of forgotten memories of his father's "emotional absence" that was the light bulb moment, when Spock decided to blend psychoanalysis and pediatrics. 

Spock knew that psychoanalysis was all about diagnosing and treating trauma. Trauma that occurred in childhood or infancy. Deep-seated trauma caused by things like putting a baby’s hands in aluminum mitts, or tying a baby’s wrists to the sides of a crib, in order to stop them from sucking their thumb. (Spock on Spock, p. 101). 

Neither of my kids were thumb suckers, but I have one who won’t keep his fingers out of his mouth now that he’s losing baby teeth, and I have never considered either of these methods. I have considered that bitter nail polish though. Did you ever use that?

And, a Freudian would see this as detrimental to a developing human’s oral stage.

Spock recognized that, this Freudian way of looking at development, paired very nicely with the routine questions from parents about toilet training, thumb-sucking, pacifiers, and weaning. And, he believed he was preventing psychological problems which often begin in childhood.

Let’s listen to an audio clip of Dr. Benjamin Spock speaking about the influence of Freud on the reassuring tone Spock achieved in Baby and Child Care:

[I think it’s wonderful that the book can be reassuring…this was the influence of Freud’s writings…]

Psychology-heads will recognize some of these names. Spock learned from Caroline Zachry, who had been a student of John Dewey. Zachry was into progressive education, which is, like project based learning, instead of rote memorization) (Spock on Spock, p. 109-112). Spock became friends with Margaret Mead and Erik Erikson.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, Spock treated mostly upper-middle class, highly educated families in New York City, he was the pediatrician to a lot of children of psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, including, sort of famously, Margaret Mead’s daughter. (Maier, p. 102).

Also, this is just a tangential aside, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary was his patient when she was a child. (Maier, p. 341).

What a famous client list! Margaret Mead was an anthropologist, right? I wonder how successful Spock was trying to marry up Freud’s Euro-centric theories with any multicultural beliefs Margaret Mead may have picked up. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

Spock also went through another year of psychoanalysis, for himself, with Sandor Rado, who was “the most assertive therapist in the city” (Maier, p. 113). These sessions really changed Spock’s philosophy about child-rearing. Up until then, Spock and Jane were strict parents with their first son, Michael, using the same Holt-style strict scheduling that Spock’s mother used. But their son John, who was born on April 20, 1944, was raised, well, I don’t think Ben and Jane Spock were the best parents, IRL, but John Spock was raised in a slightly more nurturing and compassionate way, instead of that Holtian follow-the-rules kind of way. 

So Spock took all of his psychoanalysis education and experience and he disguised it in Baby and Child Care. He never mentioned Freud at all. As his biographer Maier writes, “Masking Freudian theory in friendly phrases and American colloquialisms proved to be one of the most masterful aspects of Spock’s book. The psychological reasons for children’s behavior were put forth like the acquired wisdom of a Yankee country doctor, not like a man who had been psychoanalytically trained and twice-analyzed by by Freudians immigrated from Europe” (Maier, p. 135).

He knew that Americans were too Puritanical and conservative for Freud! It’s so sneaky. I just love this.

How do you “sneak” in Freud? Spock knew it was all about the packaging! With his folksy writing and dapper suits. 

Okay, 1. Spock believed in Freud’s theory of an oral stage. And advocated for making feeding an enjoyable experience, rather than an experience where the parents are overly controlling. So, “on demand” feeding, which is a concept or practice I think we both read about in contemporary baby books, the logic behind feeding on demand is Freudian!

Maybe to Spock, but my crunchy parenting books also taught me that on demand feeding was how our ancestors did it. I mean, our way back ancestors - the good ones. Not the ones who were tying our hands to the crib bars. Maybe the same ones who invented the paleo diet?

2. On toilet training, Spock was very chill, compared with the guides before him. And this casual approach, contrasting with his parenting advice forebears like Holt, is based on Freud’s anal stage theory. 

Spock wrote, “I don’t think there is any one right time or way to toilet-train. What works for one parent may not for another, and certainly what works for one child may not be right for another…what’s important is to know how you feel, to know how different children may react, to watch for your child’s readiness, and then to use encouragement rather than disapproval” (p. 249). 

Which is kind of good advice for anything, really!

Agreed!

3. Penis envy and castration anxiety are other Freudian concepts included in Baby and Child Care, which Spock addressed as just describing how little girl might wonder why their bodies looks differently than, say, their brother’s. And castration anxiety is expressed oppositely, like little boys might wonder why girls don’t have penises. 

4. Freud described regression, an emotional defense mechanism, and Spock describes this as a child feeling jealous and acting out, like when the parents have a new baby (Maier, p. 138).

Basically, I get the sense that Spock was trying to remove shame, because shame leads to repression, which the Freudians would consider to be a negative thing, leading to inflexible, fussy adults.

Spock acknowledged feelings in a way that was pretty groundbreaking for the time period. I don’t know anything about Freud, really, but this sounds like the talking cure, succinctly. 

He wrote, “A child is happier around parents who aren’t afraid to admit their anger, because then he can be more comfortable about his own. And justified anger that’s expressed tends to clear the air and leave everyone feeling better. I am talking not about being rough on children but about admitting your feelings” 

Wait - Spock wrote that or Freud did? All of my knowledge of Freud comes from two intro level anthropology and sociology courses in undergrad taught by men who never once brought it up, but Freud had a horrible view of women. It’s difficult to square Spock being a devotee of Freud with a true respect for the women he was advising.

I don’t remember much about Freud’s different developmental stages (oral, anal, and so forth), but take the whole concept of penis envy as I understand it. The male body complete with penis is nature’s norm. Women do not have a penis, so once a girl realizes that her body is abnormal, she envies those with penises and even feels shame at her body’s inherent lack. Castration anxiety comes from a boy’s realization that girls don’t have penises and his fear that were he to lose his he would become like them - abnormal and deficient. 

I came across this real time capsule of a NYT article from 1971 titled “The FemLib Case Against Sigmund Freud” about the difference between men’s and women’s views on Freud. Consider what the male author describes as the prevailing male view of Freud at the time:

Freud “wished to preserve the achievements of human nature against its own destructive tendencies.” This was a “fundamentally a conservative act [but] the act was on the side of freedom, a Promethean blow against obscurantism and cultural darkness.”

Since he is trying to figure out what feminists so dislike about Freud in writing this article, he goes on to state (and apologies for the long quote): “What struck me most when I went back to read Freud was not so much the hundreds of disparaging refer ences to women scattered throughout his works (they are…secre tive and insincere, they are envious and lack a sense of justice and honor, they are masochistic and deprived and, by continual implication, muti lated)...it, is that Freud's entire theory of sexu ality is built from a masculine model. In psychoanalysis, maleness is the norm and femaleness an incomplete or, even worse, deficient aspect of it.”

“even motherhood, which we understandably think of as a uniquely female capacity and accomplishment, is indissolubly linked in Freudian thought with woman's inferiority to man. For the woman has never really given up her longing to have a penis…[T]he sexual energy of females…can only be released by the actuality or felt potentiality of giving birth, an act by which the penis is symbolically obtained. To give birth to a son is the most complete symbolical appropriation.”

Maybe it’s asking too much to wonder how Freud’s ideas about the inferiority of womenkind could seep into Spock’s simple guide to so-called commonsense childrearing issues. 

But there’s also a Freudian influence, here, too, in how Spock’s earlier work was so sexist. I came across this passage in Barbara Ehrenreich’s and Dierdre English’s seminal 1970s work For Her Own Good. They write, “Freud wrote of the ‘riddle of the nature of femininity’ [and] he spoke for generations of scientists who puzzled over the strange asymmetry of nature which had made only one sex fully normal” (Ehrenreich p. 19).

So, this chapter of For Her Own Good is about the construction of scientific knowledge and the development of the market economy. As male thinkers, male scientists, were founding areas of study, they just presume that male is, like, normal. That’s the mold, that’s the baseline. And everything that is feminine is regarded as subordinate, more primitive, strange, even pathological. And, since Spock is so influenced by Freudian thought, this way of thinking HAS TO influence his view of the nuclear family and his perception that men and women were inherently different. 

The first couple of editions of Baby and Child Care were awfully sexist, just very two-dimensional about male roles and female roles. We will GET INTO IT with the gender binary and misogyny next time, so, listeners! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Did people know that Freud was in Baby and Child Care?

Spock’s biographer, Maier, wrote that Freud followers were super excited about Spock’s book. But book reviewers and Spock himself never talked, when it was first published, about how the advice was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis.

I read that Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund, visited Western Reserve University when Spock taught there, to give a lecture. She praised his book. And a colleague observed that they had similar writing styles - they were able “explain complex notions in understandable terms” (Maier, p. 256). 

Later on the book was criticized for not being based on science enough, for not accounting for the role of genetics, for being too anecdotal. In Spock’s defense, instructional books without anecdotes are super boring!

Later on, 1950s and 60s, Spock wrote a lot of popular magazine articles and kept on spreading Freudian concepts like sibling rivalry and the Oedipus complex (Maier, p. 210).

Another interesting thing about Baby and Child Care is that it became a model for self-help books. There was a popular self-help book titled Passages, big in the 70s, I guess, and the author, Gail Sheehy “explicitly told readers that it was patterned on Spock’s famous child development manual” (Maier, p. 410). 

The 1985 edition of Baby and Childcare included more advice about psychological issues and there was much less sugar coating of the psychoanalytic theory. It was more straightforward. Which makes sense, by then the American public had had half a century to grow accustomed to psychology as a framework for seeing the world.

Is it true that we wouldn’t have good ole’ run of the mill CBT talk therapy without Freud or is that just good marketing? Your run of the mill person on the street can throw out terms like “Oedipal Complex” or talk about the superego without really grasping the details of either of those concepts (that run of the mill person might be me) and still understand they a) came from Freud and b) are somehow capital-I Important ideas. Reading more about his theories now though; they don’t seem revolutionary; they seem overwrought and pretty obviously based in notions of society and the world that we now consider to be quaint at best and at worst just fully wrong. 

I recently read a fun article titled “Back to the Couch with Freud” in the New York Times Style Section about a resurgence in psychoanalysis.

Which, true, BUT, this article pointed out, for me, that there are things ingrained that we don’t even think about as Freudian. “Like anything formative from long in the past, Freud never totally disappeared. Some of his concepts, like denial and libido, are so deeply embedded in popular culture that we no longer even think of them as Freudian” (Bernstein)

I thought psychoanalysis was sort of dead, irrelevant, replaced by more evidence-based therapy techniques. But it turns out we’re all just swimming in Freudian theory without even realizing it’s in the water!

I’m not so sure how I feel about that. But! So! Back to our original question - why was the Spock brand so enduring? Did the sneaky inclusion of Freudian concepts help to popularize Spock’s work? 

I think that the pop-psychology style of writing had more to do with its popularity than the actual concepts. Going back to Anna Freud’s praise and influence, for a moment: I really think that this is an incredible strength of the Freuds and the Freud followers. I’m surely not the first person to ever observe this. But writing in an approachable, conversational style, is a really effective way to get people to read books! (Dan Brown books, for example, get a bad rep in the literary world and I’m not saying they’re great literature, but they’re very entertaining and sell a lot of copies!)

We don’t usually like the same books so I, Deborah, don’t know what you, Katie, consider readable! I used to be such an insufferable snob about books, but I’ve recently embraced reading books that are actually enjoyable and I can heartily recommend it! I want to know the love stories of all 8 Bridgerton siblings AND I want to know all the sneaky stuff the masons are up to.

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock.” In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

Since we mentioned infant feeding and the oral stage, here is a passage from the OG Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare, first edition published in 1946 about mixing formula:

“In the ‘terminal’ method, you sterilize the bottles after the formula is in them. In the ‘aseptic’ method, you boil the formula in a container and then pour it into sterilized bottles.”

“In the aseptic method, you STRAIN THE SCUM [emphasis mine] off the boiled milk as you pour it into the bottles. You can buy a funnel with a built-in strainer” (Spock, p. 31-33)

What do later editions say about mixing formula and straining the scum?

No mention in the 10th edition of straining scum, though it does say “If you’re filling a day’s bottles at once, it’s convenient to sterilize the bottles and the formula in them all at the same time (terminal sterilization).” (p.229) Then it directs you to drspock.com for more information on sterilization (this is where they put that info from the 9th edition that they didn’t think we needed anymore since they assumed everyone had access to a clean water supply.) Once you get to drspock.com, then you get the scum. After going into more detail about the terminal sterilization process, It says: “There will be less clogging of the nipple holes when the formula is allowed to cool slowly, for an hour or two, without being shaken at all. This will allow any scum to form into one large, firm piece, which will then stick to the inside of the bottle.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll explore Dr. Benjamin Spock’s misogyny in his writing!

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

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Special thanks to the WNYC Archive Collections!

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!