On March 15, 1998, a cultural icon died at the ripe old age of 94.

Benjamin Spock began work on his famous "Baby and Child Care" in 1943, at the request of Donald Porter Geddes of Pocket Books. He intended the book to combine "sound pediatrics and sound psychology." While serving in the Navy as a psychiatrist from 1944 to 1946, he finished the manuscript.

The first edition, illustrated by Dorothea Fox, was published in 1946, just as the postwar baby boom began. Selling nearly 50 million copies in 30 languages, it became the number two best-seller in America, with only the Bible outpacing it.

The book was written for mothers, who he correctly assumed would be the primary caretakers of children in middle-class homes. His work appeared at a time when the average age at marriage was dropping rapidly, and millions of middle-class women were leaving college and jobs to devote themselves full-time to caring for their homes and children. "Expertise" was in fashion, too. Ironically, Spock became one of the most trusted experts in the nation by telling parents to "trust themselves."

The secret of Spock's success was simple. He told parents to react spontaneously to their children, to give them love, cuddles, food and discipline when they felt it was appropriate--not according to a rigid schedule. This philosophy was widely interpreted as permissive, and was blamed by many commentators for the self-indulgent behavior of the baby boomers--both in the 1960's and up to the present day.

But, there is a strange duality to the book's theme. Beneath the veneer of advising parents to trust themselves, he instilled fears into them, as well. A lifelong Freudian, Spock persuaded two generations of American mothers that nursing, weaning, tickling, playing, toilet training, and other activities inherent in childhood are not the innocuous behaviors they appear to be at first glance. Such activities, according to Spock, are psychic minefields that determine a child's lifelong personality traits, and maternal missteps on such terrain can result in disabling and irrevocable oral, anal, or Oedipal scars.

Freud hypothesized that botched toilet training leads to a number of possible "problems," ranging from homosexual orientation to paranoia to a fixation with order.

In his 1992 book, "Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture," E. Fuller Torrey summarizes more than two dozen studies that attempted to substantiate a link between toilet training and personality traits. No such link was ever found. Twin and adoption studies, says Torrey, suggest that "parents have much less effect on their children than we have been led to believe - or would like to believe."

Spock became radicalized in 1962, when he felt betrayed by John Kennedy pursuing nuclear testing. Despite his left-wing leanings, he was increasingly attacked by the feminists, who blamed him for making women believe that they were largely responsible for their children's development and that full-time mothering was essential.

In the 1970s, Spock revised his book in response to feminist criticisms and decreasing sales. "Baby and Child Care" now discusses the participation of fathers, sitters, and day-care centers in child rearing and alternates the pronouns "he" and "she" when referring to children.

Ever the secular humanist, he stated in 1985, "I don't believe I go up to heaven and look down through a peephole to see how I've done. But, I know that I can help create an afterlife by influencing those who will come after me."

If anyone understands what this means, please enlighten me.