Ian Dishart Suttie
Ian Dishart Suttie, the third of four children, was born in Glasgow in 1898. His father was a general practitioner and both of his brothers and his sister became doctors as well. He qualified from Glasgow University in 1914. After a year he went into psychiatry. (1)
During the First World War he served in Mesopotamia with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). As a result he became interested in the role played in mental illness by social and cultural factors. In 1928 he moved to London where he was employed at the Tavistock Clinic. (2)
Suttie associated himself with a group of British psychiatrists who, while influenced by Sigmund Freud and sympathetic to the analytic cause, also maintained some distance from it. This included John Bowlby, a young doctor who had been trained at University College Hospital and Maudsley Hospital. (3)
Suttie was deeply influenced by the work of Sándor Ferenczi, who believed that what children want first and foremost is to exchange, both to receive and to give, loving tenderness with their parents and other caregivers. Suttie's relational alternative to drive theory focused on the importance of the bond between mother and child. This theory brought him into conflict with his friend, Melanie Klein, who believed in "the instinctual forces of envy and aggression, as the organizing force in development". (4)
Suttie's anthropological interests as well as his experience had led him to believe that his mother rather than the father was of primary importance in the early years. "He believed that all later successful social relationships are both a result of and a compensation for that early secure period of mother/infant pleasure. Suttie's concept of infantile love therefore seems to be wholly benign, and in favourable circumstances capable of straightforward growth into mature relationships." This was very different from Freud's view who believed that the development of mature human love demanded a gradual and difficult reconciliation between the opposing forces of "affection" and "sensuality". (5)
According to Colin Kirkwood, "Ian Suttie created an interpersonal and social-cultural psychology in the 1920s and 30s, one which has been unjustly neglected yet is widely influential." He argued that Suttie "drew deeply on Scottish Christian traditions" of beimg trained in philosophy that enabled him "to challenge Freud's thinking with confidence and authority, without devaluing his contributions." (6)
Suttie proposed a primary bond between mother and child, unrelated to infantile sexuality: (i) The human infant starts out in a state of non-sexual union with the mother. That is the paradigm of love. (ii) The great challenge of psychic development is separation from the mother. The trauma of badly negotiated separation from the love-object gives rise to hate. (iii) The main task of early childhood is coming to terms with independence. (iv) Coming to terms with genital sexuality is not a task of early childhood and the notion of sexual rivalry with the father is a fiction, a construction put on the jealousy of the child confronted with another person who makes claims upon the mother. (v) The great range of human activities including religion, science and culture can be seen as autonomous activities and not derivatives or sublimations of the sexual impulse. (7)
His ideas brought him into direct conflict with Sigmund Freud who believed "that the instinctual drive to maintain constancy and to reduce sexual tensions is the mainspring of later development as reductionist and inaccurate". Suttie believed that the "infant mind was dominated from the beginning by the need to retain the mother, and that this innate need was the motivation which powered all future growth." (8)
Ian Dishart Suttie's book, Origins of Love and Hate, which was at the publishers when he died from a perforated duodenal ulcer in 1935. When it was republished fifty-three years later, John Bowlby, pointed out in the intruction, that the book was "a robust and lucid statement of a paradigm that now leads the way... his ideas never died... They smouldered on, at length to burst into flame... The Origins of Love and Hate stand out as a milestone." (9)
Primary Sources
(1) David Mann, Love and Hate: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2002)
Suttie could not accept Freud's account of the origins of human emotions. He regarded Freud's long-elaborated view that the instinctual drive to maintain constancy and to reduce sexual tensions is the mainspring of later development as reductionist and inaccurate....
Suttie believed that the infant mind was dominated from the beginning by the need to retain the mother, and that this innate need was the motivation which powered all future growth. He appears to assume that the infant has both a capacity and a desire to relate to the mother as a whole object from the beginning.
Suttie made a further radical break from Freud with his view of the mother's role in child rearing. His anthropological interests as well as his experience had led him to believe that his mother rather than the father was of primary importance in the early years. He believed that all later successful social relationships are both a result of and a compensation for that early secure period of mother/infant pleasure.
Suttie's concept of infantile love therefore seems to be wholly benign, and in favourable circumstances capable of straightforward growth into mature relationships. This firmly differentiated him from Freud, who, of course, believed that the development of mature human love demanded a gradual and difficult reconciliation between the opposing forces of "affection" and "sensuality".