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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300134681 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 318 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Haunted by Parents
By LEONARD SHENGOLD
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2006 Leonard Shengold, M.D.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11610-6
Chapter One
A Literary Example of Haunting: Dr. Benjamin Spock
If I were hanged on the nearest hill, Mother o' mine, mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still, Mother o' mine, mother o' mine!
If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o' mine, mother o' mine! -Rudyard Kipling, "Mother o' Mine," 1890
In his "Letter to the Reader of This New Edition" of Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock (1957) writes, "When I was writing the first edition [of this book] between 1943 and 1946, the attitude of a majority of people toward infant feeding, toilet training, and general child management was still fairly strict and inflexible. However, the need for greater understanding of children and for flexibility in their care had been made clear by educators, psychoanalysts, and pediatricians, and I was trying to encourage this. Since then a great change in attitude has occurred, and nowadays there seems to be more chance of a conscientious parent's gettinginto trouble with permissiveness than with strictness. So I have tried to give a more balanced view" (Spock 1957, 1-2; emphasis added).
Spock, at forty-three, was writing about having again revised his book, Baby and Child Care (first edition, 1946)-eventually issued in millions of copies. (Revisions were written "every eight to ten years" [1985, 35] during the fifty-year interim period up to Spock's death.) There evolved, increasingly, a more balanced view of disciplining children with less emphasis on permissiveness. Throughout, Spock continued to stress basing parental behavior on affection and knowledge of the individual child.
Later modifications or even reversals of a thinker's initially unpopular or even revolutionary assertions commonly occur-assertions challenging accepted ideas in science, philosophy, or politics that could influence or have influenced actions and practice.
At ninety-two, Spock wrote a concise autobiographical sketch in his book A Better World for Our Children (1995), full of the dependable conscientious honesty and moral courage and fortitude that mark his writings. In his preface, Spock declares his book is about "the deterioration of our society and what caring men and women can do to leave a better world for all our children. The issues I raise in this book have concerned me for many years-as a physician, as a parent and grandparent, as an educator, and as a political activist" (16).
Spock's Childhood
Benjamin Spock was born in 1903, the oldest of six surviving children (the first son, William, had died shortly after birth). Benjamin was "raised in a family where our mother was the dominant influence-for me anyway" (Spock 1995, 19). He recalled few memories from his earliest years, but "by three I had taken on a wistful, mildly anxious look that I ascribe to my sensitivity to the frequent warnings and scoldings of my moralistic, controlling mother. She loved her babies extravagantly but was alarmed when in their second year each of her children showed signs of wishes and wills of their own. Two of her four daughters became determinedly independent, but her two sons were to a rare degree submissive to her will" (1985, 19; emphases added). (Spock himself became actively "determinedly independent" in many ways in later life when he was consciously trying to fight his tendency to passivity and submission.)
His mother, Mildred, was devoted to her six children and centered her daily life on their care. But in the view of Benjamin's sister Hiddy, "It was perfectly obvious to all of us that [Ben] was the child that she loved [the most]"(quoted in Maier 1998, 10). Kaye (1993) writes of Spock's mother, "She believed in and enforced rigid practices, rules [and] high moral standards. She told Ben and her other children what to wear, what to eat, and even when to sleep. For example, unless it was a school day, each child took a nap every day, including holidays" (15; emphasis added). Spock's mother believed that fresh air was essential for a child's good health, and the children all slept on an open sleeping porch in their New Haven home, even on freezing winter nights. Maier (1998) quotes Spock as remarking, "You didn't rebel against fresh air because fresh air was just as sacred as morality" (4).
Mildred appears to have been a severely compulsive, impatient woman who resisted the separation and individuation of her children and insisted on their unwavering obedience. She did not allow any of her children to go to public school until they were seven years old. There was little flexibility in her will of iron. Spock (1985) states that his mother "had [him] tonsillectomized three times"; the last time he was twenty and in college when "they decided that I needed one more.... There was no denying my mother" (10; emphasis added). Looking backward in his old age, Spock clearly sees that her children (each, of course, with an unknown different inborn endowment) reacted to their strict upbringing with varying and dynamically changing combinations of rebellion and compliance.
Mildred Spock, characterologically exigent, could also be contradictory. Spock (1985) describes her as filling the house with good books for the children: "Yet if she found me reading, she would immediately find something for me to do-clean up my room, mow the lawn, rake the leaves. So I would find a secret place to read" (44).
Physical closeness, kissing, and hugging within the family were discouraged. And she was hostile to any sexual manifestations: "She taught us that sex was wrong and harmful in all aspects, except when intended to conceive babies. She dearly loved babies.... She taught us that sinful thoughts were as harmful as deeds, and to touch ourselves 'down there' was not just sinful but might cause birth defects in our children" (Spock 1995, 21; emphasis added). Spock adds that, even after he had been a physician for four or five years, he was surprised to find himself feeling and saying joyfully to his wife that his newborn first child (a son) had ten fingers and ten toes. The new father was able to realize to his surprise that, despite his psychoanalytic and pediatric training, he was still unconsciously haunted by the mother of his childhood.
The reader is not told anything specific in Spock's autobiographical writings about whether he had been breast- or bottle-fed as an infant or about his toilet training. Nor, except indirectly when he mentions his mother's prohibitions, do we hear anything about his masturbation; these were all topics that were to be dealt with as so important in relation to child development in all editions of Spock's runaway best-selling book Baby and Child Care.
The boy had felt his mother was a mind reader who knew what he was thinking, as evidenced by her ability to detect a child's disobedience and wrongdoing immediately: "Only later did I realize that she had implanted such a strong sense of guilt in me that when I occasionally did something slightly naughty, my hang-dog expression was a dead give-away"(21). Spock adds, with the child's frankness and honesty that remained part of his character as an adult, that it never occurred to him to try to deceive her.
Spock gives an example of his mother's "stern moral teaching" (1995, 22; emphasis added). He was fourteen during World War I, and the government wanted people to conserve wool for the soldiers. His mother insisted on the boy's wearing one of his father's old suits to school. He refused, expecting (and ultimately finding) that his schoolmates would laugh at him dressed in adult, ill-fitting clothes. His mother insisted and got her way, saying that the boy should be ashamed to be concerned about what other people thought when he was doing what was right. The powerful, self-righteous woman-tyrant of her household-was given to promoting shame and guilt.
Alongside his registering the resultant chagrin and humiliation, there was a powerful and lasting part of the boy's mind that suppressed his indignation and felt that his mother was right. In his narrative, he is obliged to skip forward fifty years and add, in relation to his being arrested for his "vigorous" opposition to the Vietnam War: "I was comforted by recalling my mother's words. I could say to myself, 'It doesn't matter what President Johnson thinks as long as I know I'm right about the illegality, the unconstitutionality of the war in Vietnam.' I knew that my mother would have agreed"(1995, 22).
Yes, one would rejoin, she probably would have. But there is an enormous difference between being forced to acquiesce to what the parent and not the child thinks is right and an adult's own defiant refusal to give up, despite threats of punishment, what represents his own conviction. There is the shadow of past parental brainwashing in the passage quoted above-an unconscious retention of submission to mother's views that existed alongside the adult's firm and courageous resistant stance.
Father Benjamin remembered his father as having been out of the house a good part of the time and emotionally distant even when he was present. Kaye (1993) quotes Spock as saying that his father "never interfered with mother's discipline" (17). There is no hint that the father ever tried to check his wife's household dominance; perhaps he lacked the strength of character to challenge her. The octogenarian son remembers his father as having been "grave but just"(1985, 14). Father always seemed serious, and we hear of no happy memories in relation to him. The father apparently was sometimes more willing to be friendly, but Benjamin as a child was too afraid of him to respond. Ben's sons once reproached him for not hugging or kissing them when they were children; he told them that he had never been hugged or kissed by his father. (And Ben never saw his parents hugging or kissing.)
There is an absence of joy in Spock's description of his childhood and adolescent family life that suggests "soul murder." As a child, he was almost always the good boy. Spock had felt deep shame at his father's unspoken reproaches (communicated by his facial expression) on the rare occasions of his son's misdemeanors. There was much mutual hostility in the psychic space between father and his oldest son. Maier (1998) writes that Benjamin's sister Hiddy told him, "Neither [brother] got any affection from [father], and they weren't encouraged to give any. He poured affection onto the daughters and denied any to the sons" (18). Spock cites, with characteristic fairness, the contrasting (and his unshared) feelings of father having been "a darling" as recalled by both younger sisters when they were grown up.
Spock (1985) writes when he was eighty-six that his "mother was certainly the person who most influenced my life and my attitudes" (17). But he also felt "Mother was too controlling, too strict, too moralistic. Though I never doubted her love, I was intimidated by her. She controlled her children with a firm and iron hand and complete self-assurance-no hesitation, no permissiveness. She never doubted that she was right in any judgment and never softened a punishment, no matter how piteously the child pleaded. She almost never used physical punishment but relied on deprivation and severe moral disapproval. Her scorn could be withering. We all grew up with consciences that were more severe than was necessary or wise" (1985, 18; emphasis added). It is a withering portrait of a parent who seems like a character out of Dickens, a bad mother whose nurture and character cast a shadow over her son's life-like one of Dickens's one-dimensional bad mothers who hated joy (for example, Arthur Clennam's mother in Little Dorrit).
Spock and Psychoanalysis
Spock, as a physician interested in child development and as a pediatrician, was strongly influenced by reading Freud-and later by beginning psychoanalytic training, which involved undertaking a psychoanalysis. One can never know specifically what the training analysis (with the master clinician Bertram Lewin) did for him, and how much it helped him come to terms with his relationship to his parents. Spock told his biographer, Maier (1998), that he considered his analysis with Lewin "principally an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one" (94). He described telling Lewin about his early life with his difficult mother. Lewin must have been dissatisfied with his patient's "guarded self-exploration"(95) since Spock related to Maier that Lewin urged him to try to progress by exploring his dreams. Spock's mother had not appeared in his dreams, although he connected (at least intellectually) his nightmares with her. Spock also describes himself as realizing how afraid he had been of his father. He had previously attributed all of the blame for his unhappiness to his mother. He discovered how much he blamed his father for not protecting him from her and always taking her side against her children.
Spock's disclaimer of deep emotional involvement with the analysis seems contradicted by Maier's statements based on his impression of Spock's description during his interview with him: "[His] rush of forgotten memories struck Ben like a thunderbolt. His personal analysis with Dr. Lewin illuminated dark and unexplored corners of his psyche, parts of his own character Ben had never before considered. His remaining doubts about Freud disappeared" (95). It is a puzzling contradiction. Spock certainly was at least partially convinced that he had an Oedipus complex. The discovery of his hostility to his father was helpful here. I speculate that it was not the knowledge of but the depth of his sexual and hostile feelings toward his parents, especially toward his mother, that was insufficiently felt. Ben's rage as a child must have threatened to become terrifying, a murderous intensity that, accompanied by terror, needed to be repressed and reacted to with "good boy" behavior. In relation to his Oedipus complex, we also hear, and presumably Maier was told, nothing about Spock's heterosexual, homosexual, and primal scene fantasies and connected memories that would have involved both parents.
Spock, in 1937, after he had abandoned his psychoanalytic training, realized that his experience with Lewin had been "too shallow" (Maier 1998, 113) and made another try at analysis with the well-known psychiatrist Sandor Rado. (There were later subsequent attempts; also he was in a group therapy with his second wife in his last years-when he was in his nineties.)
Whatever the deficiencies of his analyses may have been, it seems likely that Spock's initial bias for permissiveness toward babies and children was a reaction to his recalling the details of his Spartan childhood with greater emotional depth as they came to renewed emotional life in the transference toward his analysts. He was haunted by the stern agenda of "She who must be obeyed," to use H. Rider Haggard's phrase (from his novel She) (1886, 81).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Haunted by Parents by LEONARD SHENGOLD Copyright © 2006 by Leonard Shengold, M.D.. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
Dr. Shengold intelligently demonstrates how the nature of parental ties shapes one's life course, how difficult it is to alter it, and how it influences creative activities. Anyone who reads this book will experience what I did—quiet hours of reflection on our own upbringing, our own parenting, and how these have shaped our lives.—Samuel Ritvo, M.D., Yale Child Study Center