Journeys in Psychoanalysis The selected works of Elizabeth Spillius

People remind me occasionally that I come from a Canadian academic family, which
is true but slightly misleading. My father, Edward Alexander Bott, came from a very
poor family and when he fi nished high school (Canadian for secondary school) he
worked hard for four years and saved all the money he could before applying to
university – although whether to study psychology or philosophy, I’m not sure.
My mother’s family was rather different. Her father was the headmaster of a
secondary school in a small Ontario town and a man whom everyone loved, myself
included. My grandmother was intensely ‘proper’, very religious and very keen on
looking for sin, especially in me (I heard that my father eventually told her to stop this).
She did not let my mother go to university – she thought the institution was immoral –
and so my mother spent some years touring small Ontario towns teaching women how
to de-bone chickens before cooking them.
Eventually my mother persuaded her father to allow her to go to university, where she
met my father. In the fi nal examinations she stood fi rst – and won the Governor General’s
gold medal – and my father stood second. He didn’t seem to mind, I was told.