ABSTRACT
As the oldest child, Spock had to help look after his brothers and sisters, which was perhaps unusual for a boy at the start of the twentieth century. At school he did well and he went to Yale, exactly as his father had done. He was not studying
medicine at that stage, but history and literature. He was also an excellent oarsman and made the Yale crew. Their eight was picked to represent the United States for the Paris Olympics. One other member of the crew was a Rockefeller. They won the gold medal. Spock was also inducted into Yale’s senior society, Scroll and Key, whose previous members included William Bullitt, America’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, who wrote a book with Freud which proved (to their own satisfaction at least) that the Treaty of Versailles was so punitive because Woodrow Wilson had never been psychoanalysed. The men got much inside information on Wilson’s neurotic behaviour because Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, worked for the president. After Yale Spock went to study medicine and graduated top of his class at Columbia in 1929. Despite his academic and sporting achievements Spock still felt his parents were not quite satisfied with him – and that was especially true of his demanding mother, who had had such a demanding mother herself. She wanted Ben to learn that sex was dangerous, an ‘emotional bomb’. So she told him he was unattractive, that when he looked at girls he was ‘disgusting’. To cope with these feelings, Spock decided to be psychoanalysed. His first analyst was a failure. Spock then asked Sandor Rado to take over. Again the connections are striking. Rado had been a pupil of Freud’s friend, Sándor Ferenczi, who had analysed Melanie Klein. This second analysis worked better and seems to have allowed Spock to express some of his negative feelings about his strict childhood upbringing. Spock was good with the oars and good with the feet. He was an excellent dancer. In June 1927, before he finished medical school, Spock married Jane Cheney. The couple led an energetic social life even when she was carrying their first child. As they had little money, they and their friends organized ‘The Dancing Academy’. For $40 a night they rented a hall and for $400 a 12-piece orchestra. Everyone paid $1.50 to get in. Spock liked to dress in a very old-fashioned way, wearing tails. He was a very popular dancing partner. When he became a father, Spock reverted to his parents’ traditions, despite his expertise and his years in analysis. ‘Jane and I were obviously old-fashioned parents’, he wrote. ‘We believed that young children should be in bed at 7, not just so they can get a good rest, but also so that the parents can have a whole evening of rest and dignity and peace.’ Strictly scheduled feeding was the rule at the time so if their first son yipped for milk at the wrong time, he was allowed to cry for an hour before being fed. Michael said:
When I was born my father was just starting out his practice in New York. The demands of New York living – parties, activities, everything – once made me complain to my parents that they went out more than the King and Queen of England. They replied that the King and Queen did not go out much.
