The Origins of Love and Hate

by Ian Dishart Suttie

The Origins of Love and Hate has long had an underground reputation within psychoanalysis. It is one of the most passionate arguments for a therapeutic practice based on the physician's love for the deeply deprived patient. It also advocated a view of human nature congruent with the findings of modern biology - a more optimistic vision than that of traditional Freudian psychology. The book is a powerful and early critique of the dual instinct theory of psychoanalysis - Eros and Thantos.

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

Reviews

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this as part of a course, when it was introduced as interesting and provocative, but ultimately irrelevant, apostasy from Freudian orthodoxy. The description stands, only it's not irrelevant. Suttie's organising principle is that Freud was a deadly miserabilist and had got that way by his own twisted psychological journeying around his fraught relationship with his mother. Freudian theory bore the marks of this crippling.

Suttie, well ahead of Bowlby and Ainsworth, insisted that it is the infant's evolutionary readiness for sociability and connection that characterises big-brained mammals, and none more so than the human. This readiness is what we call 'love'. Properly catered for, properly nurtured, it can form the basis of mature human interaction and enterprise. This rarely happens, for reasons Suttie makes clear; but it needn't be that way. It's a brilliant and hopeful book.