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History of Psychology 2009, Vol. 12, No.

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2009 American Psychological Association 1093-4510/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0014950

CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY IN IAN SUTTIES THEORY OF MIND


Gal Gerson
University of Haifa The author discusses the comprehensive outlook that shaped Ian Sutties psychology. Suttie is seen as a background inuence behind the British school of psychoanalysis, and his ideas pervade that school and therefore late-modern notions of the mind. The author describes the formation of Sutties independent theory, and argues that his project was expressly ideological, as he tried to counter what he saw as the reactionary and disruptive inuence of Freuds classical theory. Suttie offered an optimistic perception of the mind, which could serve as the basis for a progressive social policy. This perception was rooted in the outlook of early 20th-century reforming liberalism, whose preferences and prejudices it shares. Keywords: anthropology, ideology, object relations, psychoanalysis, I. D. Suttie

In middle of the 20th century, British object relations psychoanalysts such as John Bowlby, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott initiated a sea change in the theory of mind. While retaining Freuds format of therapy and his insights about the role of the unconscious, the British authors transferred the focus of inquiry from sexuality to attachment. The individuals primary motivation is no longer identied with the pursuit of sensuous gratication. Instead, the mind is seen as structured by the quest for company and by the interaction with others that this quest prompts.1 The legacy of the British school has fused with the popular image of psychoanalysis itself. While psychoanalysis is still intuitively identied with the classicalFreudian vocabulary of the Oedipal situation and erotogenic zones, the later decades of the century became equally acquainted with notions taken from the British school, such as maternal deprivation, transitional objects, and the good enough mother. Turn-of-the-millennium perspectives on mental health, child care, delinquency and other subjects are all informed by the insight that the quality of parental attention has the potential to determine the individuals life chances. As a recent observer argued, the contemporary Freudian position is in reality an object relations position.2 Ian Dishart Suttie, who published a single book in 1935, is often seen as a forerunner of the British school.3 Its main exponents referred to him as a source of inspiration, and many of his points are repeated in the later theorists almost word for word. However, Sutties own work and unique perspective on mind and society are almost forgotten. Some authoritative histories of psychoanalysis tend
Gal Gerson, School of Political SciencesDivision of Government and Political Theory, University of Haifa. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gal Gerson, School of Political SciencesDivision of Government and Political Theory, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel. E-mail: gerson@poli.haifa.ac.il

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to overlook him, and the shift of emphasis from Freud to the later relationsoriented perspectives is explained as an internal development within Freudian theory itself.4 Extant research on Suttie focuses on concepts that are abstracted from the main body of his worksuch as his observation that modern society represses tenderness rather than sexuality. Here, I look at Sutties work more comprehensively and address the political and cultural, as well as the more narrowly professional, aspects of his outlook. I argue that Suttie constructed a theory that he thought of as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis. This alternative was explicitly framed as an ideological one, rather than a merely clinical or theoretical innovation. Ideological here denotes a comprehensive outlook on culture and society that has both descriptive and evaluative aspects. Suttie thought of himself as offering a humane countermeasure to what he saw as Freuds reactionary version of civilization and the psyche. In offering this view, Suttie integrated modern psychology into the value system that characterized his historical setting. He shored up a forward-looking and particularly British perception of mind and society. As I will try to show, this involved some serious normative drawbacks that also reect the particular sensitivities and anxieties of Sutties environment. In what follows, I rst point out Sutties location within the family of psychoanalytic ideas. Next, I look at the factors that controlled the development of his theory, with particular attention to biology, anthropology, and religion. Then, I examine the contents of Sutties theory and the special importance it ascribes to sociability. The ideological hue of this theory is discussed in the succeeding section. In the nal part of the article, I point to similarities between Sutties view of mind and society and the values held by social reformers in early 20th-century Britain.

Psychoanalytical Schools
In Freud, mind is determined by organic sensations. The body is a closed system of stimuli. When that system is overloaded, it seeks discharge. The character of discharge depends on bodily sensitivity: It centers rst on the mouth and later on the genitals. When the (paradigmatically male) child arrives at this state, he is confronted with the scarcity of gratication. The mothers body, which has been the childs main source of satisfaction, is claimed by the father. The child wants to destroy the father, but is afraid of retribution. As the dread is insufferable, the child incorporates the frightening object into his own psyche. From this stage on, we do not avoid gratication because of stronger competitors but because it is immoral. Conscience is born with fear. So is culture, as the energies that cannot be expended on direct gratication are turned to productive work, commerce, and art. Civilization is an inection of the Oedipal scene. In a later addition to the model, Freud assumed the existence of a purely destructive force that operates independently of the quest for pleasure. Called the death instinct, this force was introduced to account for the extreme forms of aggression that Freud thought characterize human conduct.5 However, working in the 1920s with very small children, Melanie Klein noted that feelings of regret and ideas of good and bad precede the Oedipal stage. She speculated that they may exist from the rst months of life. Morality does not

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originate with the recognition of the fathers role. Instead, it has to spring from interaction with the childs primary caretaker, typically the mother. According to Klein, the death instinct is manifest from birth. The infant experiences destructive urges that it cannot control or integrate. Some of these urges are projected over to the environment, which is populated with bad objects. The child then tries to eliminate these objects by devouring them, with the result that they become internal bad objects. At the same time, the child has positive sensations of warmth and satiety that result in the generation of good objects. The infantile ego has to protect itself and its good objects from the bad objects. Early life is therefore warlike and nightmarish. Nonetheless, with constant maternal attention, the child may begin to be able to integrate good and bad objects into a new object, which is composite and real rather than partial and fantasized. This object is the mother herself. Her presence and care rescue the child from the agony of existence in the world of persecuting part-objects. However, the child remembers his attacks on the partial objects, which he now recognizes as parts of the mothers body. Regret overtakes the previous dread, engendering a desire to repair. Conscience and moral obligation are thus a result of the encounter with the mother. They ensue from care rather than competition.6 In what appears as an extension of Freuds and Kleins insights, British theorists such as Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Winnicott developed a third model. Although there are differences of emphasis among them, they roughly share some main premises. Freud and Klein had assumed that the rst motivations are material and have to do with the body: the satiation of urges in Freud, and the protection of integrity from persecutors in Klein. For Bowlby, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, by contrast, the subject seeks company rst. The need to relate to others precedes both libidinal gratication and protection from enemies. The quest for company underlies all other motivations. Several consequences follow on this development. One is that, as in Klein, the dening relationship is the one with the mother. As the rst company, the mother sets the pattern for the structuring of the mind. As sociability precedes fear, there is no necessary layer of fear and aggression that underpins the interaction with the mother. Children may grow into adults who are simultaneously peaceful and active. To materialize fully, this potentiality has to follow a certain course. Mother has to hold the child in order to give him a sense of security, but then she has also to gradually loosen that holding in order to let the child individuate. Healthy individuation depends on earlier holding. Without the condence gained for the child by close maternal attention, the courage to explore would not appear. John Bowlby and his student Mary Ainsworth conducted several empirical studies to conrm this point.7 A central venue for this process of individuation consists in what Winnicott calls transitional space. If maternal holding is internalized, it can be projected onto inanimate objects such as blankets and toys, as well as other tangible phenomena such as musical notes and bedtime rituals. For the child, parts of the real environment are invested with the feelings of security and intimacy associated with the mother. The objective environment begins to be meaningful and encourages exploration. Moreover, as such objects are tangible, they are perceived by other people and may serve as means of communication between them and the child. Achieving such capacities to communicate and explore, then, depends on the quality of earlier maternal holding.8

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Another consequence of the object relations premise is that the individual and society are seen as less tense and violent than Freud had envisaged. The transformation from infant to independent adult is continuous, with the same external agencythe motherseeing the child through the various stages. By the time the child begins to face reality and realizes his or her inability to fully control it, the maternal patterns of holding have been internalized and an ability to engage with the external world has been forged. As the fundamental drive is that of relating rather than controlling or exploiting, the meeting with the external world may itself be gratifying rather than traumatic. Freuds opposition of pleasure to reality and the agonistic perception of social relationship that follows it are not essential. If it be true, Fairbairn writes, that libido is object-seeking and not pleasureseeking, there is . . . no pleasure principle to go beyond.9 No fear of the world is struck into the individual, and the society where such individuals meet is not haunted by anxiety or ambitions of domination. To the extent that domination and anxiety appear, their presence can be understood as an interruption rather than the norm. Aggression and delinquency are often interpreted by the British analysts as attempts to regain the attention lost during early childhood.10 Whereas Freuds approach was materialist and individualist, the British school emphasized the social determinants of mind. Humans seek company from the start, and the shape that this quest takes through the environments responses patterns the mind. There is no inherent conict in the meeting of people within a larger society. Where Freud saw this encounter as fraught with tension, the British authors view it as potentially gratifying to the basic human need. This entails a social vision that may be glimpsed in Bowlbys report to the World Health Organization and Winnicotts comments on social issues. Bowlby and Winnicott argued that attachment is the rst human concern, and hence the rst right that should be guaranteed by the public order, which should be geared to keeping children with their primary caregivers.11 The state is encouraged to assist families directly in advice and material reward.12 To varying degrees, the main exponents of the British school acknowledge debts to Suttie. In a preface to a posthumous edition of Sutties work, Bowlby writes that Sutties emphasis on the primary role of sociability informed his own later work.13 Reecting back on the earlier part of his own career, Winnicott mentions that the notion that health and pathology precede the Oedipal phase and have to do primarily with maternal inputs occurred to him independently of Kleins inuence. It was based, he says, on his practical experience of treating children, as well as on his acquaintance with other sources: [T]here were people talking about these things before I came on the scene. . . . There were other people who werent analysts who were talking about these things: there was Suttee [sic].14 The trademarks of the British schoolthe priority that sociability takes over libidinal gratication and the ensuing signicance of maternal holdingmay be traced back to a lineage that bypasses both Freud and Klein. Suttie was older than Bowlby and Winnicott. Although coeval with Fairbairn, his main contribution precedes Fairbairns by several years. The development of Sutties theory took place through the 1920s and early 1930s. It parallels changes within the broader context of British psychology and psychoanalysis. Born in 1889 in Glasgow, Suttie took a medical degree in 1914. He participated in the First World War as a military doctor. After serving on the European and Mesopotamian fronts,

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he returned to Scotland, where he became a psychiatrist and worked in various institutions, rising from a consultant in the Glasgow Royal Asylum, where he began working in 1919, to superintendent of the Medical Asylum in Perth at the end of the 1920s. In 1931, Suttie moved to London, where he shared a clinic with his wife and occasional coauthor, the psychiatrist Jane I. Suttie. During that period he joined the staff of the Tavistock Clinic.15 The 1920s saw changes in the composition of the British Psycho-Analytic Society. In 1920, the Societys members and associates tended to be native-born and publicly involved. Their respective records show their engagement with issues of welfare, education, and social change. This was the case, for example, with the physician and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who had applied Freudian insights in his treatment of shell-shocked troops in World War I. Rivers briey stood as a parliamentary candidate with a leftliberal agenda. Comparable interests are apparent in Cyril Burt, who worked with the London Board of Education and whose research on the quantication of intelligencewhatever the credibility one may attribute to itwas expressly intended to provide social reformers and state agencies with data on the population they had to care for. A similarly motivated member was T. Percy Nunn, an educationalist who adopted the agenda of Edwardian social reformers.16 Like the Sociological Society 2 decades earlier, the British Psycho-Analytic Society in its early years functioned as a platform for discussion among a certain range of liberal and progressive individuals. By 1930, however, the picture was different. Informed by a more individualist approach and by the direct inuence of Klein, who settled in Britain in 1926, Bloomsbury-based analysts such as James Strachey and Alix Strachey increasingly dominated the scene. Their focus on private treatment and their skepticism about the wider society concurred with Freuds growing pessimism and Kleins grim view of primal aggression. Psychoanalysis retreated to the consulting room. Both Freud and Klein were seen as offering a clinical approach that, as Kleins British follower Joan Riviere put it, centered on the imagination and was not concerned with the real world.17 Controversies over the differences between Freud and Klein now occupied the Societys attention, while involvement with external, public issues receded. Atheists, agnostics, and Jews became conspicuous. The earlier, local, socially engaged attributes of the Society faded. However, the original, native perspectives did not vanish. The FreudianKleinian schism allowed the formation of a third, independent camp, to which many were slowly drawn. Approaches that diverged from Freud and Klein crystallized around the Tavistock Clinic, which Suttie joined in the beginning of the 1930s. Tavistock offered psychotherapy to those who could not pay for it elsewhere.18 This practice highlighted Tavistocks difference from more orthodox psychoanalysis, which was based on expensive private sessions. It marked the clinic as a community-minded institution that was interested in more than the alleviation of individual neurosis. According to Jeremy Holmes, orthodox psychoanalysts refused to have anything to do with the analytic fellow travelers represented by the Tavistock Clinic, who included several Christian psychiatrists like J. R. Rees and Suttie, and which was referred to by the psychoanalysts as the parsons clinic.19 This environment, in which classical psychoanalysis was challenged on a daily, practical basis, was the background against which Sutties break with Freud took place. By Sutties own account, his early reading of psychoanalytic works produced

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a rather blind devotion to Freud.20 This gradually turned to criticism and culminated in a rebellion the aim of which was an extensive reorientation and supplementation of Psycho-analysis.21 Throughout the early 1930s, Suttie published articles in nonpsychoanalytic medical and psychiatric journals. His one proposed contribution to the ofcial psychoanalytic organ, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, was rejected by the editor, Freuds ally Ernest Jones, who thought that Suttie had wandered too far from the recognized bounds of the movement.22 Sutties work culminated with the publication in 1935 of The Origins of Love and Hate. He died shortly before its publication. That book, with its social optimism and its criticism of Freud, reects the attitudes of the socially committed, native British therapists.

Psychology and Anthropology


Before returning to this move, I should look at the internal dynamics of Sutties intellectual trajectory. It was conditioned by some lifelong scholarly concerns. The rst was his search for an organizing drive that could parsimoniously explain human behavior. Suttie rejected attempts to describe the psyche by composing elaborate inventories of drives. He criticized early 20th-century psychologists such as William McDougall, who ascribed separate actions to separate instinctual motivations.23 Suttie regarded such taxonomies as next to useless, as they failed to impose system on reality. The explanation they offered was tautological, with each action ascribed to a specic, inbred motivation to carry out that action. For scientic rigor, a tighter account of motivation had to be offered.24 Sutties second scientic interest focused on the link between culture and individual conduct. During the First World War, Suttie observed patients from widely varying backgrounds respond to an identical set of pressures. He noted different patterns in their reactions. Patients relationship to an environment that had preceded their military involvement seemed to condition their ability to withstand war. Looking for the key motivation that determined all behavior, Suttie was convinced that its basis would be found in the patients early life experience, and that these experiences would vary with the overall relations between individual and society within each culture.25 In the years following the war, he called for a more sociologically informed approach to psychology.26 The concurrence of these two interests led Suttie to his engagement with psychoanalysis. In the early 1920s, it seemed to him that psychoanalysis could provide both the organizing drive and the theory of social conditioning he was looking for. He understood Freud as saying that adult personality is structured by its responses to early sexuality. These responses are themselves controlled by the family situation and are therefore culturally mediated. Psychotherapy is concerned with resolving early family-related conicts by making them conscious.27 Freud himself, however, undermined Sutties trust in psychoanalysis. In the second decade of the century, Freud developed the structural model, according to which id, ego, and superego are deadlocked in the unconscious. Therapy was now less about the release of repressed materials and more about conict management. The gloom deepened when death took an independent position equivalent to that of Eros in Freuds account. This last addition, particularly, weakened the attraction that Freuds theory held for Suttie, as it made psychoanalysis look less rigorous.28

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Sutties third intellectual concern focused on evolution and the ways in which the study of mind could be related to it. Here, classical psychoanalysis seemed to him unmistakably awed. Although Freud tried to conform to the model of the natural sciences, he appeared to overlook some crucial aspects of Darwinian evolution. For Suttie, the notion of an independent death instinct was incompatible with Darwinism. Death could be more plausibly explained by reference to evolution. The death of individual specimens clears space for new variations. Accordingly, there is no point in assuming an autonomous death drive that competes with the life-enhancing sexual drive. Death serves life rather than opposes it. Moreover, Freuds suggestion that the death drive amounts to a compulsion felt by the organism to return to its previous, unorganic condition implied that organisms in some way remember the past of their species. To Suttie, this smacked too much of the 19th-century notion of use inheritance, a Lamarckian idea that had been discredited by the rationale of Darwinian evolution. For Suttie, such thinking had no place in 20th-century science.29 For a while, Sutties search for a single governing principle and his inquiry into the social conditioning of mind enabled his alliance with Freudian psychoanalysis. However, what appeared to him as the absence of rigor in classical psychoanalysis, its inability to cohere with Darwinian evolution, and its general pessimism made the alliance increasingly uneasy. According to Suttie, the critical change in his position took place in 1932, when he realized that Freuds negative view of society sprung from the emphasis on the Oedipal situation and that this, in turn, was connected to Freuds overlooking of mothers.30 This understanding informs his conjoint articles with Jane Suttie. Even in Freuds model, motherinfant relationships are not essentially strained. Conict comes later, when the father intervenes. Maternal inputs, Ian Suttie and Jane Suttie argue, are thus benevolent and central to later character. The more condent and independent the mother, the more signicant her input is likely to be.31 The conjoint articles were inspired by Ian Sutties research on medieval and early modern witch hunting. He was later to write that this historicalanthropology research was crucial to the emergence of his independent theory.32 Contemporary anthropology provided Suttie with two social models that followed matriarchal and patriarchal lines. The 1920s witnessed several attempts to synthesize, align, or contrast psychoanalysis and anthropology. Freud worked on linking anthropology to his own previous nds, and Robert Briffault, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Geza Roheim debated the effects of different kinship structures on psychic life.33 Suttie relied on this body of work to claim that each social model generates its own system of repressions and psychic defenses. Change in the social model is likely to be accompanied by a crisis that stems from the breakdown of these defenses.34 Witch hunting, Suttie argues, was a symptom of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. He notes that witch hunting appeared in northern Europe simultaneously with the Protestant Reformation. The persecution of women coincided with the turn toward the stern masculine God of Protestantism.35 Suttie explains this coincidence by pointing to the relations between religion and the everyday experience of family life. In northern Europe, conversion to Christianity was achieved by political means rather than by grassroots proselytizing.36

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Underneath this thin layer, the north retained its old sociology. Northern society allowed women broad scope within their families. Children experienced their mothers as strong and self-reliant: [T]he house-mistress was not a servant of the paterfamilias, under his supervision and subject to his displeasure; she was valued not merely as the mother of sons and the dispenser of delights; she would therefore have self-respect and self-assertion as a woman.37 Matriarchal mothers have more sources of self-esteem than care of their children. They are occupied with household management as well as with other activities, and are therefore interested in their childrens becoming independent early. They urge children to abandon clinging and excessive physical contact. This demand is endogenous to the relationship the child knows from birth. It is not imposed from the outside by a third partner and does not represent a reality principle that contrasts with maternal love. As maternal approval is important to the child and this approval is gained by the renunciation of clinging, that renunciation is part of an ongoing relationship and involves no subsequent strain. Separation and individuation are not opposed to love. They grow from it.38 Experiencing pleasure and reality as continuous rather than opposed, the people of pagan Europe could venture into a trusting relationship with their surroundings: They were intensely realistic, with very little yearning for a sheltered infancy.39 On this civilization Catholicism was imposed. Catholicism, Suttie writes, had been developed for a patriarchy in which mothers had no standing of their own. They were economically dependent on men, and their children were their only source of prestige and their main company. In such societies, mothers have little incentive to repress their childrens demand for close and persistent contact, as that would be giving away their one social resource. Accordingly, the rst company children experience is that of a weak mother who lacks condence and whose world is limited to the nursery. When children become aware of the father, they simultaneously become aware of a power differential. The rst real authority is external to the rst relationship. Reality is opposed to pleasure. The two will now always appear as opposites.40 It is the father, not the mother, who initiates the break from constant care. His desire breaks up the nursing couple. However, the child does not easily relinquish the proximity to the mother. Repression is external to the mother child relationship. It is associated with anger and fear of vengeance rather than with a will to concur with the mothers wishes. Consequently, renunciation is never complete. It leaves traces in the shape of longing for dependency. Moreover, the striving for maternal closeness takes on the hue of the fathers relation to the mother, so that sexual wishes also attach . . . to the mother.41 As desire is the fathers prerogative, experiencing it invokes fear of retribution. Women arouse contempt when their inferior status is fully realized. It reminds the child of his early association with such unworthy authority. Subsequent social contact is colored by frustration as it is a substitute for a more wholesome relationship and is similarly marred by shame and anxiety. Children in such societies retain their infantile impulsiveness and aggressiveness, a resentment at the world, and a strong, regressive longing to shrink from it.42 Patriarchal societies develop a cosmology of dread and guilt, centered around an arbitrary male god whose anger the believers may only hope to allay by abjection and sacrice. Deferment of pleasure is always external, imposed, and

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partial. Individuals do not give up anything voluntarily. They require force physical or internalizedto keep them within bounds that make social living possible. Consequently, under patriarchy will arise the need for (auxiliary) religious repressions, atonements and other defenses.43 This is the landscape on which Christianity rst dawned: a civilization of male-dominated households worshipping a stern father god. Christianity did not simply replicate that societys beliefs. It was originally a reform movement aimed at resolving some of the tensions characteristic of patriarchy. It emphasized the accessible, tolerant face of Christ, and so countered the erceness of the Jewish god. It endorsed brotherly love and so encouraged the fellowship that Judaism had sacriced for the vertical relationship with the god. Christianity reintroduced physical immediacy into religion in the form of the Sacrament: By symbolically eating the god, the believer becomes one with him. Hence, some of the intimacy of the earliest relationship could be regained. The Jewish rules that tightly controlled every aspect of lifeas in the dietary codewere dropped. Early Christianity offered what Judaism could not offer: soothing parental approval, fellowship on equal grounds, and physical closeness not tainted by contempt.44 However, Suttie comments, if Christianity alleviated the symptoms of patriarchal upbringing, it could not address the underlying condition. Society remained patriarchal.45 In patriarchy, physical tenderness is sexualized and sexuality reinterpreted as domination and subjection. As communion was in danger of becoming degraded, Christianity had to present it as purein effect as a replication of infancy. Hence, it tended to relegate the believer to helplessness through the mystication of worship and reliance on miracles. Idealization of the mother gure through the increasing emphasis on Marys immaculacy teamed with a demeaning of real women to complete the separation of tenderness from sexuality and of the actual world from the fantasy of seamless union arrived at only at the liturgical level. Institutionally, this development manifested itself in the celibacy of the clergy.46 Christianity was oriented to the particular sensitivities and fears of its native regions patriarchy. In matriarchal northern Europe, however, Christianity was dysfunctional. Catholicism imposed the neuroses of the south on a society that had been free of them. With the dissemination of Catholic values, the contrast between practice and belief began to stand out. Maternal obligations remained, but maternal standing eroded. Mothers still psychically weaned their children according to their traditional role, but that was now resented by a society whose ofcial value system denied any authority to women. Once clerical antisexuality and antifeminism . . . had weakened the actual maternal repressions characteristic of Teuto-Celtic cultures . . . a lively Oedipus wish and dread was awakened among the people.47 The inltration of Catholicism and the corresponding decline of mothers position
subverted all the . . . cultural conditions upon which . . . a strong maternal repression depends. A patriarchal society was established, woman was relegated to the bower; she was thrown upon her children as her sole interest in life, and . . . lost prestige in her childrens eyes as manifestly the subordinate and possession of the father. Her power and her incentive to repress infantile attachments were weakened.48

Instead of healing patriarchy, Christianity destroyed matriarchy. Hatred of women erupted in collective violence, as in the persecution of witches: The witch

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phobia therefore appears to me . . . a natural product of the transition from Pagan-Teuton culture to Catholic and feudal culture.49 Prevaricating between adoration of the mother gure and disgust at living women, Catholicism was too ambivalent and weak to contain the rage generated by its encounter with pagan society. To regain its equilibrium, northern Europe had to import an external source of repression that concurred with its new derision of women: the heavily patriarchal religion of Luther and Calvin. The upshot, Suttie writes, was . . . the emergence of Protestantism, a religion affectively akin to the Judaism from which Catholicism itself was derived, and which, like Judaism, rejects with horror anything to do with mother worship or theophagy.50 The craving for contact, now understood as sexual, was repressed by fear of an overwhelming external power.51 Both witch hunting and Protestantism were attacks on the image of the mother.

From Libido to Attachment


This historical anthropology informs Sutties independent theory. Patriarchies are rent by sensations of delement and frustration that follow on maternal weakness. Because patriarchies are violent, whereas matriarchies are peaceful, the armed and aggressive cult of the father often takes over.52 Hence, by the 20th century, patriarchy appeared as synonymous with civilization itself.53 The peaceful alternative had been suppressed. Freudian theory and the central place it gives to libido, its repression, and the formation of the superego by the fear of power are products of this history.54 To correct Freuds mistake and account for the healthier dynamics of matriarchy, some other factor had to ll the place that sexuality occupied in classical psychoanalysis. Evolution stepped in to provide a clue. Natural selection made humanity a primarily sociable species. Born defenseless, humans rst look for others company, as it is the condition for the fulllment of other necessities. Substituting sociability for sexuality allowed Suttie to nally weave the threads of his separate concerns into a unied and extensive reorientation . . . of Psychoanalysis in The Origins of Love and Hate.55 Children are born sociable. They crave attention and contact. Mothers respond by providing close care. Later, other demands intervene, such as those generated by the arrival of younger siblings. However, the childs need for company is still operative and is still focused on the mother. Psychic, as well as physical, weaning is now required. Once the child is sensorially organized enough to nd interests in the environment, the mother can deect the childs attention from herself. Instead of physical contact and continuous focus on the infant itself, mother and child are now capable of sharing a song or a picture book. These external objects are meaningful to the child because of the mothers perceived investment in them. The childs sensation of safety no longer requires the unbroken presence of the mother herself. The focus on tangible items prepares the infrastructure for communication with others besides the mother. Maternal attention therefore serves as a gateway for engagement with the external world. Play and conversation, music, sports, and art all follow this opening. These activities provide individuals with opportunities to communicate and satisfy their sociable drive: culture-interests . . . are substitutes for the . . . relationship of child and mother.

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By these substitutes we put the whole social environment in the place once occupied by mother.56 While what might strike the later observer here is the way in which Suttie anticipates Winnicotts notion of transitional phenomena, some attention has to be given to the internal makeup of Sutties work. Developmental model and historical anthropology support each other. The possibility of deecting the childs attention toward an object that stands between mother and child eshes out the idea of endogenous repression that Suttie says is the working principle of matriarchies. Mothers are capable of extending the caring relationship into new spaces that, paradoxically, require less immediate care. To do this, however, the mother requires motivation and capability. Both depend on her broader social functions, having to do with her status and obligations. If these are scant, the successful loosening of contact is less likely to take place. The mechanism of gradual distancing accounts for the benevolent nature of matriarchies. As it allows children to separate and individuate without lingering pain, this device makes for a more peaceful social organization. The initial nurturing experience extends to siblings, peers, and the wider society. A benign circle is established. As the origin of all creative activity, sociability advances the species. Humanity constantly develops new interests and ideas that are all modied forms of communication. These innovations make for the marked progress that humanity enjoys.57 If sociability is the primary drive, then the appearance of antisocial or confrontational behavior points to a disturbance: [J]ealousies . . . are produced not by sexual desire so much as by frustrations of love . . . and by unbalanced and violent efforts to overcome this.58 When the child nds it difcult to tolerate the loss of the mothers constant attention, resentment builds. The external world is perceived as an intrusion and threat rather than as an occasion for engagement. The unease generated by this process manifests itself in various disorders.59 The individual may attempt to deny the importance of the motherand hence of society generallyand shut himself or herself in the inaccessible universe of madness; the individual may resort to clinging and protesting his or her weakness, and so become incapable of personal independence; the individual may also attempt to gain attention by force, as seen in the preoccupation with power and material achievement; and the individual may develop a hatred of the world that manifests itself in delinquency and violence, but owes all its meaning to a demand for love.60 As anthropology shows, such disturbances are social in origin. Where mothers are weak, they are unwilling and unable to deect the childs primary interest away from themselves. The childs interest in external reality is not properly awakened, so that the ability to communicate with others is hampered. With the realization of the fathers power, children in such societies enter a full-blown Oedipal phase, in which the need for contact is sexualized and fraught with anxiety and guilt.61 This is the civilization described by Freud and in which his theory makes sense. One function that Freud performs for this society is his dissemination of the idea that sexuality is the underlying, repressed motivation of all behavior. However, Suttie points out that sexuality is not really repressed. Its direct expression is lauded in males and its indirect expression lauded in females. The discussion of

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sex as the buried truth under civilization covers up something else: the loss of sociabilitys own legitimacy. Beyond babies, humans are not supposed to openly admit need for each others company. Where mothers are denigrated, early relating and the total dependency it entails are a source of embarrassment. Any sensation that takes adults back there is denied. Human interchange is therefore never left alone, for fear of the dependency of the rst bond. Relationships are always functionalized as commerce, debate, therapyand sex. Accordingly, Suttie characterizes modern society as suffering from a taboo on tenderness rather than on sex.62 Suttie frames the difference between his vision and the one held by Freud as ideological: What separates them is a dispute over an entire set of values rather than disagreement on the niceties of a specialized theory. Freud describes a deadlocked world in which there is no escape from conict. Suttie himself, on the other hand, is openly utopian. The basic need is not for competition-generating material goods but for contact with others. Facing reality and functioning within it are not opposed to maternal love, so that no conict between pleasure and reality needs to be assumed. Individual separation and the ability to act autonomously concur with sociability and the recognition of ones ties to others. Individuation is continuous with love, and no tension is left to poison future life.63 Accordingly, Suttie writes, I am convinced . . . of the possibility of an Oedipusfree culture.64 By contrast to Freud, Suttie looks forward to a world without strife, a civilization without discontent. By accounting for both health and pathology, by drawing on evolution, and by linking individual development to the wider social pattern, sociability links the various strands of Sutties thought. Considered as the master drive, sociability makes sense of the place of sexuality itself as a physical sensation that gains its signicance from its ability to carry an interpersonal, social load.65 Substituting sociability for sexuality positions Suttie fully as Freuds rival: It contrasts a hopeful vision of society with the worldview of classical psychoanalysis.

Ideology in Psychology
The possibility of utopia leads Suttie to an active stance toward society. For Freud, remedy was private, as society was doomed to perpetual struggle. For Suttie, by contrast, therapy should begin where illness beginsin the environment. His psychology, he writes, holds implications for mental hygiene, social harmony, and everything that concerns the cultural, spiritual welfare and destiny of man.66 Aggression and its many manifestationsintrusion on ones fellows; attempts to seal off ones boundaries from the environment; and efforts to take over others belongings by theft, robbery, and other meansare all consequences of environmental factors rather than inborn qualities. Change in the environment would lead to change in conduct.67 Although it is idle to dream of a scheme of upbringing which will make smooth the path from infancy to childhood and from childhood to adult life, it is realistic to expect an arrangement that keeps substitution as nearly abreast with privation as possible, so that the associative impulse shall develop without serious hitch from infancy to fellowship . . . then mateship and nally parenthood.68

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Suttie does not elaborate on the institutional settlements this may involve. What he does say points in the direction of a welfare mechanism.69 The complexity of industrial society makes it difcult to fully reclaim matriarchy. The demands of the workplace necessitate full-time engagement, and so make childbearers dependent on breadwinners. The division between homemaker and breadwinner, as well as the strict gender identities of the two, are essential for Suttie. He thought that the increased status of mothers would do a lot toward healing society of the taboo on tenderness, and would accordingly make men more caring and accommodating while endowing women with more condence. However, roles within the household cannot be negotiated or changed, as they are mandated by evolutionary forces. Biology decrees the further specialization of the female for the nurture of the young, and so ordains women as mothers.70 Although, under matriarchy, men may become more caring, they should not be encouraged to actually care: [I]f interest does not follow the lines of natural capacity, but covets a role for which the subject is functionally untted, the possibility of disharmony arises.71 Society may help households retain both the status of the mother and the separation of parental functions by protecting the mother child relationship from the poverty that makes mothers severely dependent on others or otherwise sends them to seek employment outside the home. Pressures on mothers may be signicantly minimized and their status enhanced by measures that would bolster their ability to initiate healthy weaning. Mothers capability to see their children through a relatively painless process of separation rests on the special position of the mother in the home: The absentee mother who is a wage-earner or who nds her children a burden . . . must obviously affect the development of their childrens character abnormally.72 This implies increased taxation, and therefore some resistance, as citizens would resent giving money away to the state. However, Suttie regards possessiveness and a refusal to share as symptoms of illness: They are attempts to seal oneself off, and follow on the denial of early dependence and the rejection of sociability.73 Once the welfare mechanism is put in place and families are geared to bring up healthier children, such symptoms are expected to decline. Reform will therefore resolve whatever tensions it creates, thus completing a benign cycle. For this utopian and optimistic hue, Sutties position harbors some conservative elements. First, Suttie values convention. The ability to participate in ones culture is a mark of health, whereas excessive criticism of ones environment raises the suspicion of occult resentment toward ones mother. A patient Suttie met early in his career, for example, manifested his illness by showing no feeling for the delicacies and niceties of social intercourse.74 Accordingly, therapy should be seen as a reconciliation of the patient to his social and cultural environment.75 Strictly standing on differences is a pathological defense. If Freud wanted to teach patients to accept the irreparable rift between themselves and the worldthe inaccessibility of total gratication, the divisive role of sexuality, and the unacknowledged hostility toward ones parents Sutties idea of clinical work points in the opposite direction. He would rather convince patients of societys familiarity and benevolence. The therapist assures the patient that there can be nothing in his own mind wholly alien to the mind of the analyst, or alien to . . . the other patient from whom the analyst has learned.

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Consequently, the patient comes to realize that there is no intrinsic difference between himself and anybody else.76 Social cement and a familiar environment are essential for health. By way of translating this insight into broader principles, Suttie proposes the maximum amount of tradition and continuity and the minimum prejudice to the adaptability of the social structure.77 Sutties worldview, then, encourages community and received practice at the expense of personal differences. Nor is this dislike of seclusion and waywardness all. Suttie grades regional cultures in a way that is hardly acceptable by later standards. This is not peripheral to his theory: The anthropological paper that he sees as pivotal to his development is titled Religion: Racial Character and Mental and Social Health. Race here is social organization rather than heredity, but it is still identied with specic groups, some of which are seen as inimical to social health. Moreover, this division of the world into good and bad cultures contributes to Sutties perception of his own role. Matriarchies provide the conditions for benevolent repression. Their beliefs and organization reect the healthy approach that individuals take when their fundamental sociability is not warped by anxiety and aggression. Patriarchies, by contrast, foster submissive mothers, dominating fathers, weak and untidy forms of repression, and hence resentment and aggressionand the ideological tenets to justify them. The opposites of health and illness roughly correspond to the Nordic and Mediterranean regions.78 In the north, matriarchal Pagan Teutondom was characterized by the highest imaginable practical standard of conduct.79 The pathology of the southits faulty, unbiological system gradually took over and destroyed northern matriarchy.80 When Catholicism, already corrupted by centuries of Mediterranean inuences, intruded on the norths harmony, it generated [g]reed, violence and superstition, alternating with a regressive ight from the world.81 Originally attempting to heal patriarchy, Christianity introduced the conception of social life as based upon Love rather than upon authority.82 Whatever eventually went wrong with Christianity was a result of its encounter with the culture that it tried to reform: [T]he Christian tradition has been transmitted through emotionally distorted minds.83 The cult of the Virgin, celibacy, and the reliance on miracles were all responses to that society. Catholicism developed the features that it later imposed on pagan matriarchy, thus leading to the further complications of witch phobia and Protestantism, which Suttie perceives as a reformulation of Judaism, the religion of southern patriarchy. From solution, Christianity declined into a problem. Southern patriarchy was the culprit in this process. Similarly, Suttie points out that psychoanalytic practice began from a pretheoretical stage in which the therapeutic powers of interpersonal communication were given free scope. In the 1880s, Joseph Breuers talking cure had pointed to its own explanatory theory: Love and recognition heal the patient. Although later denied by Freud, this intuition was retained by him in practice, and was given some theoretical body by Sandor Ferenczi.84 But in its classical, full-blown form, Freudian theory replicates the hatred and envy of patriarchal society. As it pits pleasure against reality and individual against society, orthodox analysis perpetuates the governing pathology. Instead of showing patients the possibility of love,

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Freud composed a childish hymn of hate.85 Being a distortion of an earlier sound intuition, Suttie concludes, Freudian theory is itself a disease.86 The process by which the talking cure became metapsychology shares its pattern and its main agents with the process by which Christianity became Protestantism. Like Christianity, psychoanalysis was eroded by contact with patriarchyand a specic patriarchy at that. Freuds own antecedents, Suttie writes, lie in perhaps the most patriarchal of all cultures, a circumstance which, along with his preoccupation with the neuroses, led him to discover the paternal repression rst.87 Judaisms sense of guilty apprehension poisoned both ancient and modern attempts at regaining mental health.88 The northsouth, TeutonicJewish divide that distinguishes matriarchy from patriarchy, therefore, is operative not only in the history of religion. It implicates Freud and positions Suttie himself as the exponent of a new psychology that would be free of the cultural trappings of classical psychoanalysis. Sutties conventionalism and his position on cultural differences support each other. For Suttie, Freuds hateful attitude manifested itself in iconoclasm. Freuds psychoanalysis deliberately contravened the norms and conventions of its time in the name of scientic rigor. Suttie offers his own work as an attempt to save psychoanalysis useful therapy from its counterintuitive and asocial metaphysics. The abstract, detached posture of science, which Freud imports into the clinical scene in the shape of the largely silent analyst, is an antithesis to the Christian religion which seeks to reconstitute the tender relationship . . . which is lost in early childhood.89 By contrast, Sutties theory and the compassionate therapy it entails are organized to reintroduce common-sense into the science of psychology: an effort to purge psychoanalysis in the same way that early Christianity purged monotheism of its guilt-ridden elements.90 Suttie provides an ideology and a militant voice to the turn that the practice at the parsons clinic took against classical psychoanalysis. He aligns optimism against gloom, social engagement against seclusion, compassion against aloofness, pure-hearted Christianity against Judaism, north against south.

Progressive Sensibilities
Sutties vision is rooted in the broader context of early 20th-century social reformism. Sociability as a core human need, conict as avoidable evil, and the special attention given to the household and to the mothers role: All these are characteristic of Edwardian and interwar progressive opinion. Among psychotherapists, its main locus was the Tavistock Clinic, but its appeal was wider than that. J. A. C. Brown characterizes Sutties work as a typically English response . . . to Freudian orthodoxy.91 As Brown explains, British here means adhering to a politically progressive standpoint.92 The search for a new, secular basis for friendship was one of its main attributes. The social reformers of the early 20th century had inherited from their Victorian predecessors an ethics of altruism, in which selshness was the major vice.93 The Edwardians, however, had lost their predecessors religious and intellectual condence, and so had no solid platform on which to base their ethics. The attempt to nd an intellectual foundation for fellowship and sociability became a crucial feature of their world.

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As a political ideal, friendship was deployed to counter the conservative insistence on the sanctity of property. Making property rights the touchstone of the political order, some reformists argued, endowed people with a perception of themselves as mutually indifferent players. Competition instrumentalized all relationships and limited the leisure needed to develop intimacy.94 In a harshly capitalist society, even childrens games were mistaken for training in skills rather than understood as what they actually were expressions of unmediated closeness and joy.95 Consequently, retrieving the possibility of true companionship became an ideological project. The classicist Cecil Delisle Burns who held social democratic and internationalist views, thought that the lesson of Greek antiquity was that the polity should be based on companionship: Not contract, nor fear, nor even common purpose so much as good fellowship makes social groups.96 Much of the practical agenda of advanced liberalism in early 20th-century Britain had to do with creating spaces for interacting with others.97 The progressive theorist Graham Wallas suggested that government should provide occasions that the person isolated by the demands of work may use to reconnect to the sociable life of families and voluntary associations.98 To support this project, progressives emphasized the constitutive nature of the sociable motivation. The perception of fellowship as a fundamental motivation underpins R. H. Tawneys critique of the acquisitive society.99 Social philosophers such as L. T. Hobhouse pointed out that the isolated, self-enclosed individual of classical state-of-nature theories is an impossibility. Individuals are nourished by others from their birth, and so never encounter an asocial condition. The maternal care that makes infants survival possible, rather than primeval war of all against all, is the state of nature.100 Love, not material gratication, is the foundation of all social transaction: There can be no personal fullment without it.101 Relationship is a basic good that merits political and legal recognition. What we imperiously need, Hobhouse writes, like our daily bread, is to be in relation with others. Without others, nine out of ten of our own activities and emotions are incomplete because lacking response.102 As these authors often traced the basic benevolence and mutual interest they ascribed to humans back to the mother child interaction, they tended to view the family as a site of disinterested love. Progressives demanded that the family be protected from the market, and that government act to minimize pressures on mothers to leave their children for work.103 These attitudes connected progressive opinion to the broader British public. Early 20th-century sensibilities saw attachment to family as a particularly British trait. Commentators compared the English household favorably with what they saw as its more disciplinarian foreign counterparts.104 Through its defense of the family, the liberal left found both a venue for sociability and a national symbol that drew it closer to other strands of opinion. British progressives, however, came up against the barrier of evolutionary theory. Evolution seemed to shore up a pessimistic outlook in which the struggle for survival underpins all social interchange. Progressives made several attempts to turn Darwin their way. Common to these attempts was the idea that humanitys advance from brutish life to the complex civilization in which weaker members are protected is itself mandated by evolution. Advanced civilizations refusal to

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weed out the weak allows for broader variation. Solidarity and compassion may therefore be seen as the source of humanitys supremacy.105 Works by Patrick Geddes and his coauthor J. Arthur Thomson, D. G. Ritchie, and Hobhouse emphasized the simultaneous development of individuality and cooperation. Humans are more individually distinct than the specimens of any other organism, and they are more capable of performing tasks together. The centrality of solidarity and cooperation in evolution led back to the valorization of the family. The nuclear household is the place where evolution achieves perfection: Mates choose each other individually but specialize by gender and so become indispensable to each other, a situation that increases their mutual attachment and their devotion to their offspring.106 In early 20th-century progressive circles, the preoccupation with altruism and sociability generated a suspicion of reclusive or wayward conduct. Such behavior was seen as an object for social concern rather than as a legitimate expression of individuality. Reform was not revolution. It sprung from respect for ones peers and their sensibilities. Burns, the classicist who saw Athens as a model for a better Britain, went out of his way to present Socrates and Plato as mild critics of their fellows, rather than downright iconoclasts.107 Edwardian progressives expected individuals to conform to the folkways of their own times, to converse with their fellows through the received social idioms, and to adhere to the form of household organization recognized by their generation.108 Hence, accounts of the social world that favored solidarity and sociability placed themselves at the heart of the national consensus through their privileging of family values. When politically mobilized, they became grounds for social reform. These positions were occasionally framed in group-specic terms, as being characteristic of insular culture and as marking its advantages over other societies. Sutties emphasis on the search for company as the rst motivation, his attitude to the mother child relationship, his efforts to link this to evolution, and his trust in convention all emerge as characteristic of early 20th-century Britains leftliberal, progressive constituency. The Edwardian mindset that Suttie elaborates was threatened by what was perceived at the time as a European-wide crisis, of which Freud was a symptom. New intellectual and cultural trends became apparent during the rst decades of the century. Inuenced by Nietzschean philosophy, sociological functionalism, and the effects of war and revolution, the European mindset became preoccupied with aggression and desire. Convention in art, politics, and everyday life was now questioned and sometimes ridiculed, whereas new venues for self-expression in literature, visual art, and music took center stage.109 Suttie was occasionally suspicious of new cultural forms: [I]t seems possible that refuge from tender feeling and pathos generally is being sought in sex and that this ight is expressed in some peoples intolerance of good music and delight in jazz excitement.110 His alternative psychology anchored the theory of mind to the safe harbor of household and fellowship. Contemporary responses to Sutties work approved of his ability to bring the reassuringly familiar back into psychology. One reviewer lauded him for refuting the opinion that has found . . . its crudest expression in such a statement as Every mother is her childs rst seductressan opinion so monstrous as to prove of itself that its originator is incapable of understanding what maternal love means.111

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Suttie clearly struck a chord, and his legacy within psychotherapy and its theory retains these concerns. Trust in the nuclear family, an idealization of motherhood, and an overall reformist drive characterize midcentury object relations theory. As mentioned earlier, Bowlby, Fairbairn, and Winnicott endorsed many of Sutties clinical innovations. Although the circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s made Sutties views on ethnicity and culture less publicly tenable, much of the nativist avor of his worldview persisted. Jeremy Holmes characterizes Bowlbys work as reaching back through Freud to a more stable Victorian world.112 Janice Doane and Devon Hodges point out that Winnicotts rosy description of motherhood and the family came from the heart of a traditionally male-dominated, Christian, and native-British middle-class consensus. Winnicott contrasted his outlook with that of the female Jewish immigrant, his mentor Melanie Klein.113 The British schools theory may consequently be thought of as a local, nationally, and ideologically based reaction against the unsettling impact of classical psychoanalysis and its broader intellectual baggage. Although not endorsing Sutties openly confrontational attitude to Freud, the later British theorists found his work helpful in offering a perception that was more in keeping with their received values.

Conclusion
Sutties alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis is a comprehensive worldview that includes approaches to society and culture. Suttie portrays a world in which individuals are interested primarily in each others company. Sociability is essential to the survival and advance of the species. It enables both the thriving of individuals and the development of cultural elds. This potentiality unfolds when mothers are allowed signicant scope within the household. They are then able to present separation and individuation as part of an ongoing caring relationship. No hiatus has to open up between relating and personal autonomy. Cultural pursuits are experienced as modes of conversing with other people rather than as attempts to cover up or compensate for an interruption to that conversation. Antagonism and strife are external impositions. In the history of civilization, such impositions have become the norm, as the ascendant patriarchy made mothers vulnerable. Society may be reformed through measures that protect the mother child relationship and encourage sociable interaction. This concurs with early 20th-century strands of opinion on the British liberal left. Sutties mooring in evolution, emphasis on sociability, and trust in motherhood and the family all t in with this environment. Suttie contrasts his own outlook with the sinister worldview he identies with patriarchalism and Freuds theory of mind. He accounts for Freuds position by referring to Freuds background. The reliance on sociability and the household countered the unsettling impact of classical analysis, in which peoples profoundest intentions and the most apparently innocent institutions were questioned. Sutties theory may be seen as an effort to offset the intellectual disruptions of the early 20th century and to strengthen, instead, the governing values and beliefs of a certain British social segment. The extent to which later psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are associated with the tenets of the British object relations school attests to the relative success of this effort.

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Endnotes
1. Lavinia Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations (New York: New York University Press, 1997); J. R. Greenberg and S. A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); P. Homans, The Ability to Mourn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); L. J. M. Hughes, Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 2. Graham S. Clarke, Personal Relations Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), 14. 3. Clarke, Personal Relations, 13536, 169 70; J. Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1993), 2324; J. D. Sutherland, Fairbairns Journey into the Interior (London: Free Association Books, 1989). 4. S. A. Mitchell and M. J. Black, Freud and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 5. Mitchell and Black, Freud, 122; P. Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (London: Transaction Books, 1969). 6. M. Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1965). 7. Holmes, John Bowlby, 10324. 8. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971). 9. W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1952), 78. 10. J. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1951), 5557; D. W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Brunner-Routledge, 1984), 306 15. 11. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 109. 12. M. Rustin, The Good Society and the Inner World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); B. Mayhew, Between Love and Aggression: The Politics of John Bowlby, History of the Human Sciences, 19 (2006): 19 35. 13. J. Bowlby, Foreword, in The Origins of Love and Hate, I. D. Suttie (London: Routledge, 1988), xvxviii; J. Bowlby, The Nature of the Childs Tie to His Mother, in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. P. Buckley (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 15399. 14. D. W. Winnicott, Psycho-Analytic Explorations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 575. 15. H. A. Bacal, Ian Suttie, in Theories of Object Relations: Bridges to Self Psychology, eds. H. A. Bacal and K. M. Newman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1727; D. Heard, Introduction, in Suttie, Origins, xixxl. 16. For their works, see C. Burt, Social Undercurrents in Contemporary Philosophy, Sociological Review 8 (1915): 114 17; T. P. Nunn, Education: Its Data and First Principles (London: Edward Arnold, 1920); W. H. R. Rivers, Mind and Medicine (Manchester, England: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920). For discussion, see G. Gerson, Margins of Disorder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 7276. 17. Holmes, John Bowlby, 130. 18. G. Richards, Psychology and the Churches in Britain 1919 39: Symptoms of Conversion, History of the Human Sciences, 13 (2000), 57 84, especially 65. 19. Holmes, John Bowlby, 24. 20. Suttie, Origins, 229. 21. Suttie, Origins, 256. 22. Bacal, Ian Suttie, 17. 23. W. McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Wiley, 1908). 24. I. D. Suttie, Critique of the Theory of Herd Instinct, Journal of Mental Science, 68 (1922): 24554; I. D. Suttie, Moral Imbecility, Journal of Mental Science, 70 (1924): 362 63.

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25. Heard, Introduction, xxixxii; I. D. Suttie, Some Aspects of Sociology and Their Psychiatrical Application, Part I, Journal of Mental Science, 69 (1923): 49 51. 26. I. D. Suttie, Some Aspects of Sociology and Their Psychiatrical Application, Part III, Journal of Mental Science, 69 (1923): 314 18. 27. Suttie, Some Aspects, Part III. 28. I. D. Suttie, An Unwarranted Accretion to the Freudian Theory, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 5 (1925): 8391. 29. I. D. Suttie, Metapsychology and Biology, Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, 5 (1924): 6170. 30. Suttie, Origins, 3 4. 31. I. D Suttie and J. I. Suttie, The Mother: Agent or Object? British Journal of Medical Psychology, 12 (1932): 91108; I. D. Suttie and J. I. Suttie, The Mother: Agent or Object? Part II, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 12 (1932): 199 233. 32. Suttie, Origins, 3 4. 33. R. Briffault, The Mothers (New York, 1927); B. Malinowski, Psycho-Analysis and Anthropology, Psyche 4, (1924): 293332; G. Roheim, Australian Totemism (Lon don: G. Allen & Unwin, 1925). 34. I. D. Suttie, Religion: Racial Character and Mental and Social Health, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 12 (1932): 289 314. 35. Suttie, Religion, 301. 36. Suttie, Religion, 289. 37. Suttie, Religion, 294. 38. Suttie, Religion, 290 95. 39. Suttie, Religion, 295. 40. Suttie, Religion, 300 01. 41. Suttie, Religion, 300. 42. Suttie, Religion, 300. 43. Suttie, Religion, 300. 44. Suttie, Religion, 296. 45. Suttie, Religion, 301. 46. Suttie, Religion, 298. 47. Suttie, Religion, 299. 48. Suttie, Religion, 299 300. 49. Suttie, Religion, 300 01. 50. Suttie, Religion, 289 90. 51. Suttie, Religion, 301 02. 52. Suttie, Origins, 12126. 53. Suttie and Suttie, Mother, 95. 54. I. D. Suttie, A Common Standpoint and Foundation for Psychopathology, Journal of Mental Science, 79 (1933): 18 26. 55. Suttie, Origins, 256. 56. Suttie, Origins, 16. 57. Suttie, Origins, 19 20. 58. Suttie, Origins, 125. 59. Suttie, Origins, 435. 60. Suttie, Origins, 23. 61. Suttie, Origins, 104 07. 62. Suttie, Origins, 80 96. For comment on this, see G. Miller, A Wall of Ideas: The Taboo on Tenderness in Theory and Culture, New Literary History 38 (2007): 667 81. 63. Suttie and Suttie, Mother, 93; Suttie, Origins, 11718. 64. Suttie, Religion, 303.

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65. Suttie, Origins, 72. 66. Suttie, Religion, 303. 67. I. D. Suttie, Letter to the Ed., British Medical Journal, 3862 (1935): 83; I. D. Suttie, Letter to the Ed., British Medical Journal, 3867 (1935): 32728. 68. Suttie and Suttie, Mother, Part II, 210. 69. This has been argued at some length in G. Gerson, Object Relations Psychoanalysis as Political Theory, Political Psychology 25 (2004): 769 94. But see Clarke, Personal Relations, 182 89, and Clarke, Notes on the Origins of Personal Relations Theory in Aspects of Social Thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 13 (2008): 32534, for a different interpretation. 70. Suttie and Suttie, Mother, Part II, 213. 71. Suttie, Origins, 122. 72. I. D. Suttie, Mental Factors in the Welfare of the Child, Public Health, 48 (1935): 294 301. 73. I. D. Suttie, Is Acquisitiveness an Instinct? Psyche, 13 (1933): 154 63. 74. I. D. Suttie, Two Cases Illustrating the Conception of Moral Imbecility, Journal of Mental Science, 70 (1924): 618. 75. Suttie, Origins, 248. 76. Suttie, Origins, 251. 77. Suttie, Origins, 121. 78. Suttie, Religion; Suttie, Origins, 150 55. 79. Suttie, Religion, 290, 292. 80. Suttie and Suttie, Mother, Part II, 218. 81. Suttie, Religion, 300. 82. Suttie, Origins, 140 41. 83. Suttie, Origins, 146. 84. Suttie, Origins, 20317. 85. Suttie, Origins, 255. 86. Suttie, Origins, 218. 87. Suttie, Origins, 104 05. 88. Suttie, Origins, 196. 89. Suttie, Origins, 3. 90. Suttie, Origins, 259. 91. J. A. C. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 64. 92. In separate works, Graham Clarke and Gavin Miller propose viewing Suttie as part of a local, Scottish context, whose cultural characters combined enlightenment and religion. They count other relations-minded writers such as Fairbairn and John Macmurray as springing from a similar background to form a particularly Scottish school. Such reading adds depth and historical weight to our understanding of the way that object relations psychoanalysis developed. Their accounts concur with the one offered here of Suttie and the British School as largely bypassing continental inuences and the cannonical psychoanalysts such as Klein and even Freud: Clarke, Personal Relations, 136 37; G. Miller, Scottish Psychoanalysis: A Rational Religion, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44 (2008): 38 59. However, I should also caution against projecting the emerging regional nationalism of the millennium back to the earlier part of the 20th century. Suttie conforms more closely to Browns interpretation of him as belonging to an insular culture by aligning himself explicitly with the English psychologists, who are unattached to any school: Suttie, Origins, 5. Both Brown and Suttie use English and British interchangeably. 93. S. Collins, Public Moralists (Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1991), 60 90. 94. J. A. Hobson, A Modern Outlook (London: Estes, 1910), 16 18; H. Maxwell, The Conduct of Friendship, The Nineteenth Century, 199 (1893): 399 415.

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95. J. A. Nicklin, Ideals of Friendship, The Westminster Review 149 (1898): 680 87. 96. C. D. Burns, Greek Ideals (London, 1917), 17. 97. R. Goodin, Reasons for Welfare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 98. G. Wallas, The Great Society (London, 1914), 373. 99. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Dover, 1921). 100. L. T. Hobhouse, Social Development (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1924), 151. 101. L. T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good (London, 1947), 162 63. 102. Hobhouse, Social Development, 156. 103. J. Lewis, Models of Equality for Women: The Case of State Support for Children in Twentieth-Century Britain, in Maternity and Gender Policies, eds. G. Bock and P. Thane (London: Routledge, 1991), 7392; S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 104. J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993), 79 84, 9394. 105. M. Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978), 8299. 106. P. Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1889); L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906); D. G. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1893). 107. Burns, Greek Ideals, 158 59. 108. See, for example, Graham Wallas perception of early utilitarianism as not sufciently shaped by real world experiences and his description of Jeremy Bentham as a sedentary bachelor: Wallas, Great Society, 102. 109. M. Eksteins, The Rites of Spring (New York: Houghton Mifin, 1990); S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 110. Suttie, Origins, 85. 111. Anon., Review of The Origins of Love and Hate, Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, 16 (1936): 377. For further discussion of Sutties reception, see Heard, Introduction, xxviixxxi. 112. Holmes, John Bowlby, 215. 113. J. Doane and D. Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 30.

Received October 5, 2007 Revision received September 22, 2008 Accepted November 25, 2008 y

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