Beliefs about the Mind as Doxastic Inventional Resource: Freud, Neuroscience, and the Case of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care

Abstract

Commonsense beliefs about the mind are routinely operative in human discourse, where they serve as prolific resources from which to generate discourse/understanding while often remaining in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the realm of the undiscussed.” As a study of how mind-related beliefs serve as a resource for rhetorical invention, this essay (1) provides insight into an important and pervasive category of doxastic beliefs and (2) brings into focus the powerful undertow of doxa’s routine discursive work. It does so, in part, by analyzing Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling child-rearing manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, together with reactions it elicited from readers. These show how mind-related beliefs can generate discourse while being suppressed in the discursive iteration, resulting in fragments, enthymemes, implications, and presences/absences. Moreover, published in multiple editions over many years, Spock’s book demonstrates the inventional implications of historical changes in widely shared beliefs about the mind.

Notes

¹ Barthes was discussing stereotypes but, construed in a very broad sense, as seemingly equivalent to doxa. See Anne Hershberg-Pierrot.

² The Benjamin Spock Papers, a collection containing documents pertaining to Baby and Child Care, is held at Syracuse University Library in Syracuse, NY. Access to this collection informs the analysis that follows.

³ As a pediatrician with a specialization in psychiatry, Spock received psychoanalytic training (see Bloom 70–72). He characterized his work as consisting of “diluted extrapolations of Freudian concepts” (qtd. in Sulman 258). Of course, he also had other intellectual influences and inclinations, and he certainly did not write the manual that Freud would have written had he taken up the task (Spock “Don’t Blame Me” 38; Zuckerman 204; Grant 222).

⁴ Baby and Child Care’s Freudianism is well established. One commentator has written that “most of its prescriptions, from feeding and toilet training to ‘play with peers,’ are solidly rooted in Freud’s concepts” (“The Explorer” 76, 78). See also A. Michael Sulman; Lynn Z. Bloom 128–129; Thomas Maier 134–144; Nathan G. Hale 285–286. Spock’s first work applying Freudian principles to child-rearing practices was a 50-page pamphlet, co-authored with Mabel Huschka, called The Psychological Aspects of Pediatric Practice.

⁵ Two publishing houses simultaneously published hardcover and paperback versions of Baby and Child Care. All quotes from Baby and Child Care that appear in this section of the essay are from the first hardback edition.

⁶ For a comprehensive account of Freud’s popularity in the United States during this period, see Nathan Hale’s The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States.

⁷ Likewise, expert theories are influenced by doxa and there is a constant dialectical movement between the two, blurring the distinction between episteme and doxa.

⁸ In my study of letters to Spock in the Benjamin Spock Papers at Syracuse University Library, I found none that referenced the book’s Freudianism. Spock himself said that he “received almost no letters or correspondences about that” (Maier 135).

⁹ As scholars of the history of child-rearing practices have observed, parents do not always interrogate the presumptions that guide their child-rearing practices, and “The new parent or the young teacher quickly settles into a routine and may never realize that the practices that have been slipped into are based on assumptions that could be astounding if made explicit” (Cleverley and Phillips vii).

¹⁰ While the originality of Freud’s formulation of the unconscious is debatable, he certainly played a significant role in articulating, developing, and popularizing the concept. See Henri F. Ellenberger.

¹¹ I used the search function within Google Books to track instances of the word. While these numbers come with an important caveat about the undetermined reliability of the Google Books search function, they do give a rough sense of the uptick in use of the term “brain” across editions of Baby and Child Care.

¹² As a discursive resource, therefore, the concept of the unconscious offers a ready line of argument for rhetorical apologia. And more generally, given that personal responsibility is of key concern, the rhetorical apologia has important stakes in the matter of mind-related doxa.

¹³ Partly in response to criticisms that he promoted an overly permissive parenting style, Spock revised later editions to put more emphasis on the rights of parents (Spock, “How My Ideas”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle G. Gibbons

Michelle G. Gibbons is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Delhi, 454 Delhi Drive, Delhi, NY 13753, USA. E-mail: [email protected]