An Historical, Empirical Look at Sigmund Freud and Benjamin Spock’s
Parenting Ideas, Claims, and Promises
Mark Nichols and Paul Robinson
Brigham Young University
Parenting systems today are based largely on principles taken from previous theorists. Benjamin Spock based his system largely on that of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, including its anti-punishment claims. Spock has helped spread the idea that punishment is detrimental to prosocial behavior change, yet research has shown the opposite to be true. This presentation reviews the historical aspects of Freud and Spock’s parenting ideas and the empirical support (or lack thereof) upon which Freud and Spock’s parenting approach is based.
Historical Look at Freud and Spock:
On May 6, 1856, Sigmund Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia (Czechoslovakia). The family moved to Vienna in 1860 where Freud remained the rest of his life except for the year of his death, which occurred in London on September 23, 1939. Freud emigrated to England when he was exiled by the Nazis in 1938.
Although Freud graduated from the gymnasium at seventeen years of age and entered the medical school of the University of Vienna in 1873, he did not earn his M.D. until 1881 because he was engaged in research. In 1882, Freud was an “Aspirant” and later a junior resident physician at Vienna’s General Hospital. He studied with Charcot in Paris in 1885; the following year he entered the practice of neurology.
Freud’s academic career with the University of Vienna began in 1883 as a privatdozent, with elevation to the rank of associate professor in 1902, but not until 1920 did the institution see fit to confer on him the rank of full professor. With Eugen Bleuler and Carl G. Jung he founded the Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1908; the following year he and Jung delivered a series of lectures at Clark University (Massachusetts) where he was granted an honorary doctorate; the year after, he formed the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Freud went to the University of Vienna intent on being a research biologist. Freud’s later psychological writings often included parts of models borrowed from physics, chemistry, neurology, and the theory of evolution. For example, one of Freud’s first books, The Interpretation of Dreams, included a model of the human mind based on the reflex arc. Freud came to the psychiatric field through his research moving in the direction of neurology as he worked on the physiological foundations of cocaine in the central nervous system (Torrey, 1992).
The beginning of Freud’s work in developing psychoanalysis started in the 1890s when he collaborated with physician Joseph Breuer who was working with a woman patient who seemed to be curing herself of hysteria by talking things out. After trying a talking out approach on several patients, Freud and Breuer authored a book entitled Studies on Hysteria (1895).
In the 1870s, an Italian psychiatrist named Cesare Lombroso argued that delinquency was caused by genetics. His theory was evidenced by Dugdale's (1877) study of criminals in New York State where he traced 140 convicts to one family line (Craren, 1978). This was still the main theory for delinquency in America when two important events occurred. First, Sigmund Freud had developed a theory that purported to explain the reasons for aggression and juvenile delinquency in terms of childhood experiences. Second, in 1925, R.A. Fisher published Statistical Methods for Research Workers in which he identified an effective experimental paradigm that included control groups and inferential statistics. Freud's theory and Fisher's paradigm provided a basis so that mental health professionals could initiate studies to identify specific causes for aggression and delinquency.
In the early 1900s, Freudian theory became known in America as it was introduced and used in court systems for juveniles and adults. Dr. William Healy, a British psychiatrist who moved to Chicago in 1909, identified social factors outlined in Freud's theory as the cause of delinquency rather than heredity. He began working in the juvenile court system and soon thereafter became the director of the Judge Baker Guidance Center affiliated with Harvard University. His work became the cornerstone of mental hygiene and child guidance movements of the day (Healy, 1915, 1917). Around 1915, Drs. Bernard Glueck (Glueck, 1916) and William White (both psychiatrists) began pushing for the use of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to cure criminal behavior in adults. White even argued that offenders shouldn't be punished because their actions were unconsciously motivated (Torrey, 1992).
In the 1920s and 1930s, an increase in juvenile delinquency across America prompted researchers to examine possible social factors causing this increase in criminal behavior. In 1950, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck published the results of a very extensive survey examining over 400 factors and their potential to cause juvenile delinquency. They compared a control group of 500 11-18 year old young men to an experimental group of 500 incarcerated young men of the same age. They found that 1.5 times more delinquent boys did not have warm relationships with their mothers and that parents were 2 times more likely to employ physical punishment on delinquent boys. However, delinquents' parents were 2 times more likely to be inconsistent with their discipline techniques. Also, delinquent boys were more than 13 times more likely to come from homes with permissive mothers than overly strict ones, and 93% of delinquent boys came from homes where there was lax parental supervision and they were allowed to make their own decisions.
In 1957, Sears, Maccoby and Levin interviewed 379 mothers who had a child of 5 years of age on 72 questions relating to sex, aggression, feeding, dependency, restrictions, and demands. 54% of mothers who said spanking caused hurt feelings also said that it did some good, while 43% of mothers who said it caused anger said it did some good. It's interesting to note here that the authors concluded that punishment was detrimental to prosocial behavior when so many parents in their study thought it was helpful.
In 1959, Bandura and Walters expanded the previous research by interviewing both parents and their 14-18 year old sons. They interviewed 26 control families and 26 where the boys in the family were on probation. They also found that many of the boys' reports regarding parenting techniques were not consistent with the parents' own reports.
All three of these interview research studies identified parental use of punishment as more of a cause of delinquency and aggression than parental permissiveness. Later research was to show this conclusion to be incorrect.
Following in the Footsteps
Benjamin Spock was born in New Haven, Connecticut to a household dominated by his mother. He studied at Yale and Columbia before taking up residency at Cornell in pediatrics. He married Jane Cheney who later introduced him to psychoanalysis. He decided to receive three psychoanalyses throughout his life, in part because he felt he would be better able to understand patients' psychotic behavior, and in part because of his own belief in and experiences with an Oedipal conflict. When describing part of his experiences with psychoanalysis, Spock is quoted as saying "although my mother's criticalness and warnings contributed much, I think, to making me a timid child, my deeper instincts made me fear my father's anger more, even though I never saw it come out." In 1933, Spock opened his own pediatric practice and from that point on began attempting to combine pediatrics and his passion for Freudian theory. Later in 1946, when an editor suggested he write a manual for parents, he, with the help of his wife, wrote Baby and Child Care (Torrey, 1992).
Baby and Child Care
In 1946, Benjamin Spock wrote Baby and Child Care. A number of themes are evident from its content. First, Spock regularly advises parents to leave their children alone, in part because the behavior is something the child will grow out of. One instance where he recommends parents leave their kids alone is when the children start their exploring behavior before two years of age (p. 310). He suggests quadrupling the time it takes to run to the store so you can indulge your child’s curiosity. On pages 366 and 367 he also describes how parents who feel guilt, like they’ve been unfair or neglectful, tend to let their children get away with bad behavior, or even encourage it. This permissiveness may result because parents are told to be careful when disciplining their children in order to avoid harming their immature, child-like, psyches. Spock felt undoing the negative effects of discipline could require years of psychoanalysis (Torrey, 1992).
Second, soft Freudian language is ever present throughout the book. For example, enuresis in girls he felt may be a result of being competitive for the father, which is lay language for the Electra complex. He also describes how adolescents’ rebelliousness is more than a desire for independence – it’s a deep down rivalry with the parent of the same sex.
Another theme of Baby and Child Care is one of communicating acceptance to children. The goal is to help them feel equal with their peers and overcome embarrassing behaviors through increased esteem. Spock suggests when discussing bedwetting with your child, express confidence that he (or she, although usually it’s a he) will overcome it just like many other children. He also suggests that rewards may be worth a try, but that a better idea would be to give the child a gift right away so the child feels equal with other children. Rather than explain the gift as a reinforcer to increase the occurrence of a behavior, he feels the gift is used to increase the child’s esteem.
Baby and Child Care was meant to increase parents’ ability to be effective at raising socially well-adjusted children. Yet Spock’s advice, which is permissive, combined with parents’ own errors of being permissive, leads to permissive parents. Spock’s advise to parents, which was essentially Freud's theory, was never empirically supported. In 1989, Spock came to admit that “It’s professional people—like me—who have gotten the parents afraid of their children’s hostility, and I don’t know if we can undo it. Pandora’s Box has been opened” (Torrey, 1992, p. 142).
In 1959, Spock attempted to prove Freud's parenting ideas using scientific methods. He recruited 21 families that were expecting their first child and submitted them to psychoanalytic counseling twice a month for six years. Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, personally trained a number of the eleven eminent psychiatrists who provided the counseling to the families. Spock hypothesized that with the counseling they were providing, difficulties could be avoided in breast-feeding, thumb-sucking, toilet training, and sibling rivalry. These children were followed up for at least 13 years.
His results proved rather disappointing for him. Spock recognized that "the children in the Study had just as many problems as any other children." "…One child ‘was still wetting the bed at twelve years in spite of all the psychiatric and pediatric ingenuity expended on his case for nine of those years’” (Torrey, 1992, p. 134). Spock also noted that it was impossible to predict which children would experience later social problems based on earlier interaction with their parents.
The results of the study also showed that his techniques lead parents to become permissive. Spock noted, “The parents were afraid to impose toilet training firmly for fear it would create hostility between themselves and their children” (Torrey, 1992, p. 141). Spock also noted that, “All of the mothers ignored, in their apprehension, some of the evidences of their children’s general readiness and several of them even ignored specific signals of bowel or bladder urgency” (p. 141). What is even more interesting is that for some time after the study, Spock still maintained his belief in Freud's theory and claimed it couldn't be refuted through objective data.
Freudian Parenting
Over time Freud had developed his psychological theory that every person’s psychosocial development is motivated by instinctual sexual drives initially activated in infancy. These drives typically result in conflict situations in our youth that get repressed in our subconscious and initiates an inner psychodynamic state of turmoil for which psychoanalysis provides the release. Freud theorized that individuals come into this world and go through sequential stages of development where their libidinal gratification is focused on oral, then anal, then phallic physical stimulation. Freud taught parents to be permissive and allow children to work their way through problem situations without parents causing internal trauma in the child by being too strict in their expectations with their child. Freud’s theory advised parents to be careful not to damage children’s psyches by disciplining them, because even psychoanalysis might not be able to undo the damage parental discipline can produce. Freud taught that parents should guide their child’s development by creating a warm parent-child bond and helping a child through interactive talk to uncover and reveal the unconscious conflicts that are inhibiting the child’s progression. Freud discouraged parents from over-supervising their children through the use of rewards and punishments. Freud did not develop his theory by basing his theoretical principles on empirical evidence, but rather claimed that his theory and its parts needed no empirical testing. Freud’s psychological beliefs were essentially based on theoretical subjective speculation (Torrey, 1992).
Scientific Support for Freudian Parenting
In 1992, psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, a well-respected psychological researcher, reported on the findings of his search to identify the scientific evidence upon which Freud’s very influential psychological theory was based. He found out many before him had set the same goal, beginning with MacFarlane in 1916 and including Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb (1937), Orlansky (1949), Hilgard, Kubie, and Pumpian-Midlin (1952), Kline (1972), Eysenck and Wilson (1973), and Eysenck (1985).
The conclusions of all these reviews can aptly be summed up by referring to conclusions drawn by Hilgard’s group (1952) and Eysenck (1985). Hilgard, Kubie, and Pumpian-Midlin (1952) concluded “anyone who tries to give an honest appraisal of psychoanalysis as a science must be ready to admit that as it is stated it is mostly very bad science, that the bulk of the articles in its journals cannot be defended as research publications at all.” Eysenck (1985) wrote “Freud was without a doubt a genius not of science but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof but of persuasion, not of design of experiments but of literary art. His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin but with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, tellers of fairy tales.” (In medical school Freud had proclaimed he was destined some day to greatness and would be placed amongst Copernicus and Darwin.)
Freud’s psychological beliefs and theories were based on personal experiences and theoretical speculations rather than empirical research findings. He did not feel his psychological ideas had to be scientifically tested. Once in Freud’s later years, a psychologist wrote Freud to tell him that he had scientific support for Freud’s theory. In reply Freud testily quipped that his theory needed no validation (Torrey, 1992).
The lack of scientific validation for Freud’s work is illustrated by a chapter on Freudian research that was published over three decades after Freud’s death in 1971, in The Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change. Being the most widely used textbook in the 1970s to train clinical psychologists, the book had chapters on research supporting the most popular psychotherapeutic approaches of the day. Two well known psychoanalysts wrote the chapter on psychoanalytic research and began the chapter with the following statement: “Rare is the therapist who knows of even two quantitative studies in this (psychoanalytic) area, and still rarer (if any exist at all) is the therapist whose practice has changed as a result.”
The idea that Freud’s psychological theories were based on theoretical speculation rather than scientific evidence is supported by taking a close look at some of his claims. In 1935, just four years before his death Freud made the following statement about the cause of neurosis:
“All that I am asserting is that symptoms of these (neurotic) patients are not mentally determined or removable by analysis, but that they must be regarded as direct toxic consequences of disturbed sexual chemical processes, [specifically from] excessive masturbation and too numerous nocturnal emissions” (Torrey, 1974).
A second psychological theory that Freud strongly advocated was the idea that all women are emotionally traumatized because they do not have penises. Fisher and Greenberg (1977) state the issue accordingly: “Freud theorized that the female never fully accepts her lack of a penis. He consequently portrayed her as unable to shake a chronic sense of body inferiority”…. “For Freud, women were not merely handmaidens for men, but anatomically and intellectually inferior beings that have come into the world for something better than become wise” (Torrey, 1992, p. 250). Scientific evidence has never been produced which would support Freud’s ideas about masturbation causing all anxiety or women being driven by penis envy, and present day psychology does not support those ideas either. Freud produced no empirical scientific evidence upon which to base his psychological theories. Neither did any of his advocates produce a substantial body of empirical research findings to validate Freud’s theories.
It was previously mentioned that research findings in the 1950s were published in which the authors of the investigations (e.g., Glueck and Glueck, 1950; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, 1957; Bandura and Walters, 1959) all claimed their research showed parental use of punishment was the cause of juvenile delinquency and child aggression. As other investigators began looking closely at their findings, articles began to appear that refuted their conclusions. For example, Yarrow, Campbell, and Burton (1968) reviewed Sears et al.’s (1957) data and said “in order to interpret the data as having established a link between high punishment and high aggression, it is necessary to select among the findings and to ignore many results that are not in line with the hypothesis.”
Yarrow et al. (1968) report finding no significant relationship between parental use of punishment and child aggression. Schuck (1974) uses a somewhat more sophisticated data analysis (path analysis) approach than either Sears et al. (1957) or Yarrow et al. (1968) and confirms Yarrow et al.’s (1968) finding that there is not a significant relationship between parental use of punishment and aggression in children. Schuck (1974) also reported “for both Sears’ and Yarrows’ data, permissiveness has significant direct and indirect causal influences upon aggression.”
With the reevaluation of earlier studies that initially indicated parental punishment causes aggression now showing parental permissiveness being the cause of aggression, the results of other studies began showing up that also related juvenile delinquency and aggression to permissive parenting rather than parental punishment (e.g., McCord and McCord, 1959; McCord, 1975; Nye, 1958; Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks, 1975).
McCord and McCord published the results of a very extensive and expensive research project in 1959 that had begun in 1937. Their purpose was to test the viability of Freudian parenting principles by having youth counselors trained in non-punitive parenting methods and counseling work one-on-one with 325 treatment group boys. 325 boys matched with similar characteristics were used as a control, and data was gathered on each boy until 1945. According to the authors, “The program failed to reduce either the number of criminals or the number of crimes... there were no significant differences between the control group or the treatment group.” They also noted that, “Consistent discipline...tended to prevent criminality; lax discipline resulted in a relatively high proportion of criminals.” Joan McCord did a 30-year follow-up to this study in 1975 where she managed to locate 95% of the boys who originally participated in the study. McCord was very surprised to find that men from the treatment group – the group that received the counseling that was supposed to reduce delinquency – committed significantly more crimes than the men from the control group. She also found that the longer and more intensive the counseling, the greater the probability of later criminal behavior. It appears then that Freudian techniques used to counter delinquency in the McCord and McCord (1958) study, actually tended to increase it.
Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks added to the review literature in 1975 by identifying 31 studies published between 1945 and 1967 that were designed to use individual or group therapy to reduce recidivism rates among delinquents and criminals. As reported by Wilson and Hernstein in their 1985 book, Crime and Human Nature, Lipton, et al. found “little consistent evidence that such programs had a beneficial effect. Group therapies in particular seemed to be of small value; there were few reliable and valid findings concerning their effectiveness.” To this point the research indicates that, (1), Freudian psychological theories are not supported by scientific evidence, (2), juvenile delinquency and aggression is due more to parental permissiveness than parental punishment as Freud and Spock claimed, and (3), child counseling based on Freud's ideas does not help reduce juvenile delinquency or aggression.
Experimental Research
The indirect methods cited above that analyze the effectiveness of parenting techniques show that punishment is a useful method. This claim is further supported by experimental research. In 1959, Ayllon and Michael successfully demonstrated that reinforcement and punishment procedures controlled aggressive and abusive behavior in 19 institutionalized adults. Williams, in 1959, identified reinforcers that two parents were unknowingly providing their child that led the child to act so unruly. He successfully eliminated the tantrum behavior through extinction procedures. In 1973, Alexander and Parsons’ behaviorally oriented approach for dealing with delinquency reduced delinquents’ recidivism rates by half in just a year and a half time period. They carried out an experiment with control groups where a contingency contracting behavior modification program was the treatment applied to boys and girls sent to juvenile court for various minor delinquencies. One group of youth offenders experienced the contingency contracting experience, a second group experienced a conventional group discussion counseling program, and a third group was a no-treatment group. The contingency contracting group’s recidivism rate was significantly better than the other two groups’ rates.
Conclusions
It seems that the popularity of anti-punishment parenting systems is based precisely on that – popularity. There is little, if any, empirical evidence that Freud’s system is at all effective; in fact, no such system has ever been applied and used by parents or any social group. It seems that Benjamin Spock’s use of the media has greatly influenced the public’s perception of the importance of Freudian parenting principles. His published articles in Redbook magazine and his book Baby and Child Care have been the media through which he has promulgated his parenting philosophies. His toned-down Freudian language actually seems intuitive at times; it’s a sound-good feel-good model that has taken a hold on parenting systems. But it’s a system that remains unproven through qualitative and experimental research.
Several conclusions can be drawn from our review of Freud and Spock's parenting ideas:
1. Freud's theories relating to parenting (and all other aspects, for that matter) have been presented to the public as scientific fact when they lack any substantive scientific support.
2. Initial research studies published in the 1950s (e.g., Glueck and Glueck, 1950; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, 1957; Bandura and Walters, 1959) incorrectly identified juvenile delinquency and aggression to be caused by parental use of punishment.
3. Later studies reevaluated the earlier studies and noted parental punishment was not a major cause of juvenile delinquency and aggression.
4. Later studies indicated parental permissiveness was a cause of juvenile delinquency and aggression.
5. Studies indicate youth counseling based on Freudian principles do not reduce the probability of youths becoming delinquents.
6. Studies show the use of reinforcement and punishment as behavior change procedures can reduce juvenile delinquency and aggression.
Although Spock has sold over 40 million copies of his book Baby and Child Care, the popularity of his ideas is not scientifically proven. Although many parents may claim that they don’t need to use punishment when dealing with their children, it is important to remember that punishment is not physical abuse, yet the application of something perceived as negative in order to decrease the occurrence of a behavior. Punishment is indeed an effective behavior change tool that has received bad press through the broadcasting of Freudian parenting principles.
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