Origins of Love and Hate (The Work of Ian Suttie)

excerpted from
Houston Smith's 'Why Religion Matters --
The fate of the human spirit in an age of disbelief':

My wife recently reminded me of something I had forgotten. At a dinner for Aldous Huxley while he was paying a campus visit to Washington University, I asked him if there were any books he found himself returning to reread. Actually, he said, there were two. One was Sir Herbert Read's Art and Education, and the other was a book no one at the table had heard of, Ian Suttie's The Origins of Love and Hate. A psychologist herself, Kendra followed up on the second book, and this is what she found.

Its author, a Scottish psychiatrist, is something of a mystery. He died in midcareer in the 1930s, and his work was ignored until a student of his, John Bowlby (who became a recognized name in child development) took it up and brought out a second edition of his neglected book.

Like Freud and other psychologists, Suttie believed that people deal with anxiety by shoving worrisome thoughts and feelings into the unconscious. But unlike psychoanalysts, he became convinced (through his research) that our major repression is not of sexual or aggressive impulses, but of affection and openness. These repressions in individuals add up to a collective taboo against tenderness in our culture.

Beginning at the beginning, Suttie saw infants as born with two independent propensities. The one that is primary is a desire for the social give-and-take and responsive relationship that we call love. Sexuality, in his theory, exists as a separate and independent drive.

This is a radical departure from Freud, who likewise posited two independent drives, one of which was sex (the libido) and the other aggression (the death instinct). Freud described the infant's earliest state of consciousness as auto-erotic and narcissistic. In contrast, Suttie describes the earliest state (before an infant distinguishes self from others) as a state of symbiotic communion.

In the Freudian view the infant believes itself to be omnipotent, able to summon the mother magically with its cries. It cathects to the mother because she relieves its bodily tensions. To Suttie this was as preposterous as saying that the mother loves the baby because it is a breast-reliever who drains her swollen mammary glands.

In his years of careful scrutiny, Suttie became impressed by the early overtures that a baby makes to evoke a response from its mother. It fixes its gaze raptly on her face while nursing, and this often gets a loving gaze in return. Soon the baby starts smiling around the nipple as it sucks, often dropping the nipple and gurgling with delight if it gets a response. It is a mode of flirtation. In the harmonious interchange between mother and child, the baby gives the only thing it can, its love and its body as the first shared plaything. It is the beginning of the creativity that Suttie sees in play, which (he says) is the mother of invention, not necessity.

A critical period comes when the infant is able to differentiate itself from its mother, and its mother from other persons. It is only then that the baby can know separation from its mother, and this separation is the major source of human anxiety -- a fear of abandonment. At about the same time acceptance is no longer unconditional. Some of the baby's bodily functions and activities may not be welcomed or approved.

In baby or adult, hell hath no fury like rejected love. Here we have Suttie's understanding of the origin of anger, which he saw as a baby's desperate effort to reclaim a lost harmony. Depending on the degree of pain and hopelessness the small child goes through, intimacy may be renounced, and a quest for self-sufficiency (or power) may take its place -- the typical route in our individualistic West, Suttie believed.

...It is as Suttie says: tenderness is a cultural repression. Suttie cites obsessive, compulsive sex as another possible outcome of repressed tenderness, for (as the saying goes) you cannot get enough of what you do not really want. What is needed and wanted (but our culture denies, Suttie argues) is emotional closeness. Not sex, nor food, nor power, nor any other surrogate can satisfy that need.