The Primacy of the Mother for Ian Suttie

A few days after Scottish psychiatrist Ian Suttie died in London on October 23, 1935 at the age of 46, his only book, The Origins of Love and Hate (London: Free Associations Books) was published. It has gone in and out of print for over 70 years. Suttie is credited with anticipating the ideas of another Scottish physician, Ronald Fairbairn, and the attachment theorist, John Bowlby. The latter called Suttie’s sole-published book, “a milestone” (Bowlby, in Suttie, Origins, p. xvii). Ian Suttie’s work is a revision of Freud’s body of work.

In taking Freud’s ideas and running with them, Suttie is able to develop fundamental new psychoanalytic insights. Like Freud, Suttie recognizes that human biology dictates a long period of dependency and has shaped the human to be both adaptive and non-adaptive. Suttie sees love and hate as stemming from the infant’s relationship with the mother. To Suttie, “love of mother is primal…as it is the first formed and directed emotional relationship.” Hate, on the other hand, is not primal but is an intensification of the anxiety over separation (p. 31). When the newborn’s need to retain

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the mother is thwarted, it arouses terror and rage as loss of mother is a premonition of death (pp. 15-16). Suttie connects love, hate, and anxiety over mortality to the recurring process of attachment, separation, and reunion.

The centrality of the mother-child relationship in Suttie’s work cannot be overestimated. He shows in greater complexity than Freud the interactive dynamics of mother-infant attachment. Where in the beginnings of the positive male Oedipus complex, Freud characterizes the boy as loving the mother and directing his anger at his father, Suttie presents a complete spectrum of emotions toward the mother in what would nowadays be called the pre-oedipal period.

To Suttie, the mother-infant relationship can be both tender and reciprocal. As well as the mother nurturing her baby, the infant wants to give to his or her mother. Suttie asserts that the original interaction between these two entails both giving and getting (p. 50). The mother gives the breast, and the baby, the mouth. Suttie uses the word “gift” to describe this interaction, which he also calls “mutual absorption.” As time goes on, and the baby becomes more aware of the world, cooperative activities lead to common meanings. A companionship of love between mother and child exists where they are each the other’s world; this commonality evolves into a companionship of interest. The mother-child sharing develops into curiosity about external beings (“objects” in Freudian terminology, p. 32). Interest in the world is an outgrowth of the common meanings in the mother-child bond; this is not just sublimation, but an extension of the care between mother and child. It is not surprising then that Suttie understands “love as social rather than sexual…and as seeking any state of responsiveness with others as its goal….culture-interest is derived from love as a supplementary mode of companionship” (p. 36).

Mutual attachment is not the only side of the child’s relationship with the mother. “The exigencies of life…interrupt this happy relationship” (p. 39). The mother may reject the baby’s gifts, or the mother does not give as much to the child, or at times is un-

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available. Separation-anxiety sets in, the infant mixes love-longing with worry and anger, and this is called ambivalence (p. 39). These worries and longings stem from the fact, according to Suttie, that humans are the only anxious creature (p. 19). The child wants to rid him or herself of these angry and ambivalent sentiments and to restore harmony with the mother. For the baby, this hate of the loved one is intolerable, and recovering the closeness of love is a matter of life and death (p. 42). There are a variety of different ways the child seeks to regain the mutual absorption. Some are more successful than others, and different relational patterns are formed. Whatever the evolved psychological relationship of mother and child, mother is “supremely important…in building up the child’s first idea of itself and its first ambitions and purposes.” She not only enforces repression and denial, but also strengthens the constructive side of the child’s personality (p. 101).

The centrality of the mother’s influence leads Suttie to differ from Freud on oedipal developments. Where in the early stages of the positive male Oedipus complex, Freud has the father standing between son and mother, to Suttie, it is the mother who generally enforces the ban on incest, rejects the son’s overtures, and enforces repression. Freud separates love and hate; the former being directed toward the mother and the latter at the father. Suttie, on the other hand, has love and hate initially both directed toward the mother.

It is only when maternal repression is weak, Suttie declares, that patriarchal suppression is evoked. The father’s enforcement does not fully replace maternal repression. For maternal rejection is more effective in repressing the oedipal wish than is the father’s threat of castration. The infant can only imagine gratification with the mother’s knowledge. Should the mother repudiate incest, the child has difficulty proceeding to the next stage of oedipal desire. “The idea, ‘mother would never consent,’ is the conclusive barrier to the oedipal wish, even at fantasy level” (pp. 101-102). In Freud, even though the unfaithful mother chooses the father over the son, Freud does not envision the mother as the enforcer of the incest ta-

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boo. While her distancing leaves the Freudian son estranged and bitter, the son’s anger in the positive Oedipus complex is directed primarily at the father. Why the Freudian son is not equally enraged at both mother and father is not addressed in Freud’s writings. The son in Suttie focuses his hate mostly on the mother. What Suttie omits is the complete Oedipus complex and the place of varied sexual/gender identifications and identity in the formation of the self. The place of the father is secondary to the mother in Suttie’s psychology. Still, he does discuss how rivalries and resentments between all family members can impact on the varying dynamics characteristic of families.

When Suttie describes adult love, it is not surprising that he centers it in the vital relationship between mother and infant. He says that the rapport between child and mother is central for all species who nurture offspring. Love has its roots in “a sense of security and companionship which is pleasant in itself, and which certainly plays a part in life from very early days” (p. 69). The “nature of love” is “necessarily subconscious and involuntary” (p. 74). In sexual relations, “the complete passion of love integrates genital appetite with that ‘love’ or tenderness which is the descendant or derivative of infantile need.” This sexual connection aims at “restoring the lost sense of union with the mother,” as intercourse and infantile sucking are alike. The sexual act “is totally reciprocal” and “restores the free give-and-take of infancy” (p. 72).

By stressing the mutual, the reciprocal, the gift, tenderness, and companionship, Suttie grounds the intimate attachments of infancy and adulthood to relationships and benevolence. He is not blind though to the darker side of bonds, to how the infant’s crisis of separation arouses hate and anger along with a drive on the child’s part to restore harmony with the mother. His ideas then can help us understand how closeness and conflict can be part of love relationships. Both the security and volatility of romance is captured in Suttie’s work. The cycle of attachment, separation, fear of death, and reunion would apply to the dynamics of adult romantic love as it did to mother-infant relations, even though Suttie himself

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does not make this connection. In relation to the four sets of questions in the “Prelude” (see p. ?? in this issue) about the nature of love, Suttie does give a definition of what love entails by tying together love and hate as containing the germ of a theory of love’s dynamics. He is better at describing maternal than paternal love; he integrates romantic and parental love, but does not show their difference. Like Freud, he does not really show what sustains and what undermines love, nor does he describe developmental stages of adult romances. Still, by grounding close relationships in an ethic of mutual care and the disruption of the mother-infant bond as the origin of hate, Suttie helps advance the understanding of the dynamics of love from its beginnings in infancy through adulthood.

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