How True Was Freud?

A character in A.S. Byatt’s 1990 Booker Prize novel Possession articulated a view on Freud that probably represented the conventional wisdom:

In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan.

But how true was Freud’s vision, both in details and in the large? Psychoanalysis has taken a serious battering in recent times. The hapless patient in therapy has become a stock sitcom character, and a growing number of books like Jeffrey Masson’s Against Therapy cast doubt on the scientific credentials of Freudian theory, the results of therapy, the motivation of therapists and the role of the profession in stifling internal criticism.

These developments would not have come as a surprise to Ian Dishart Suttie. He did not agree with Freud’s large plan, and his early death cut short a promising career as a creative reformer in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. He might have had a major hand in setting the movement on a more scientific course, integrated on one side with biology and medicine, on the other with sociology and anthropology. He wrote only one book, The Origins of Love and Hate, which was in press when he died in 1935. The book is still in print, but Suttie has not been given adequate credit for anticipating the fall of the Freudian empire.

Suttie’s Leading Ideas

In company with some other analysts such as Sandor Ferenczi and John Hadfield, Suttie challenged Freudian orthodoxy along these lines:

The human infant starts out in a state of union with the mother. That is the paradigm of love.

The great challenge of early psychological development is separation from the mother and the main task of childhood is coming to terms with independence.

Coming to terms with 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.

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.

Suttie’s life

Suttie was born in Glasgow in 1889. His father was a general practitioner and Ian graduated as a doctor from Glasgow University in 1914. He turned to psychiatry and served in the Army Medical Corps in France and the Middle East. He returned to the Glasgow Royal Asylum where he met and married Dr Jane Robertson, a fellow psychiatrist. In 1928 he moved to the Tavistock Clinic in London, while he and Jane established a private practice in Bloomsbury. In addition to his clinical commitments he organised a series of private meetings for friendly but rigorous discussions with colleagues from other schools of thought. Unfortunately his plans for further development of his ideas cannot be reconstructed because his papers, including preliminary work for a second book, were lost when a bomb destroyed the archives of the Tavistock Clinic during the London blitz.

He was an active and energetic man; it is said that he wrote standing up in between walking up and down the room. He was dogged by health problems. Early in life he experienced a serious kidney disorder and for ten years before his death he suffered frequently from a duodenal ulcer. He did not willingly accept the diets that were recommended and one of his joking ambitions was to climb a mountain and sit down to a banquet, complete with wine, at the summit. His final illness came upon him in 1935 while the book was in the hands of the publisher and he died in the week that the first copies emerged from the press.

In Freud and the Post-Freudians, J.A.C. Brown sketched the state of play in British psychology after the turn of the twentieth century:

One could read quite an appreciable portion of its literature without being acutely aware that it had anything to do with living beings at all, and the average textbook, after dealing with every conceivable aspect of perception, association and conditioning, remembering, and the rest, will close with a single chapter on Freud … Social psychology until quite recently was almost non-existent in Britain.

In that situation, theories that related more directly to human concerns had great appeal and the “talking cure” made an impression during the First World War when cases of “shell shock” did not usually respond to medical treatment. After the war the psycho-analytic movement made rapid progress in professional circles while popular literature began to spread the new gospel. The inner circle of Freudians fragmented into three main strands; Freudian Psychoanalysis, Adler’s Individual Psychology, and Jungian psychology. Orthodox Freudian ideas soon became dominant, driven by the British Psychoanalytical Society (founded by Ernest Jones in 1919) and Institutes of Psychoanalysis that opened in Berlin (1920), New York (1931) and Chicago (1932). Jones was not only Freud’s official biographer but also a power broker. In 1912, as a member of Freud’s inner circle, he organised the “Secret Committee” to safeguard the theoretical and institutional legacy of Freud. The immediate aim was to remove Jung as a rival, first by evicting him from the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

According to Brown:

From that time onwards orthodox Freudians began to show the peculiar intolerance to criticism which even now [1961] is one of their less amiable characteristics … those within the group were expected not to criticize its fundamental beliefs and those without were informed that they had no authority to do so … To Freud himself every critic appeared as a moral hypocrite, every honest and serious judgement was considered a ‘resistance’.

In Britain the main alternative to the Freudian doctrines was provided by a number of psychotherapists who broadly accepted the Freudian ideas but remained independent of the organisation. Brown referred to these as the Eclectics and many of them such as Hadfield and Suttie were attached to the Tavistock Clinic. Ernest Jones, as the head of the Psychoanalytical Society, declared the Tavistock Clinic out of bounds for his colleagues.

Suttie’s Approach

Suttie suggested that the desire to avoid the intrusion of sentiment into our scientific theories may have gone too far in psychology, possibly under the influence of excessively austere views about the nature of science and its methods, especially the emphasis on reductionism or “nothing but …” explanations. He wrote, “It is even rather absurd that some psychologists should idealize the formulations of physical science at a time when physicists themselves are not agreed as to the kind of formulae which is desirable.”

He saw the relevance of animal studies and he used evidence from anthropology in a critical and scientific matter. He suggested that we should consider the human mind from a biological point of view as the product of evolution, with two additional kinds of influence, namely family and culture. Brown considered that Suttie was the first, and almost the only, British psychologist to realise the significance of cultural factors, which he observed in many cases of mental illness that he encountered in Mesopotamia during the First World War.

In the chapter on “Biology of Love and Interest” he noted that the unworldly nature of rat and pigeon psychology drove people who were interested in things like the sources of enjoyment, happiness and misery to the work of Freud and his followers. Suttie considered that the field had advanced a great deal in the previous twenty years though much remained to be done to break the stranglehold of Freudian orthodoxy:

Psycho-analysis in fact is losing much that made it obnoxious to European philosophy, good sense, and good feeling, but it still fails to take a wide enough view of its subject matter. This statement may seem outrageous to many who are acquainted with Psycho-analytic studies of Art, Biography, Primitive Customs, etc., but it must be remembered that psycho-analytic ideas are merely applied in these fields; they are developed and tested almost exclusively in the consulting room.

Coming to Grips with Freud

Freud’s ideas can be evaluated on several levels: the scientific (new or true?), therapeutic (successful or not?) and cultural (liberating or destructive?). Suttie’s critique is directed at all three aspects. In particular he parted company with Freud on the nature of the basic drives and the Oedipus Complex:

“The tentative theory I have formed differs fundamentally from psychoanalysis in introducing the conception of an innate need-for-companionship … This need, giving rise to parental and fellowship “love”, I put in place of the Freudian libido, and regard it as generally independent of genital appetite.

I had been compelled to reject the Freudian Metapsychology on logical and biological grounds from the time of its appearance, but it was not until 1932 that I seriously questioned Freud’s sexual theory and the clinical conception of the Oedipus Complex and sex-jealousy, paternal repression and castration-anxiety, as the main determinants of   culture and character. In February of the latter year, however, in studying the change that had occurred in Teutonic culture and character during the Middle Ages and particularly the history of the witch phobia, I reached the conclusion that repression was a function of love, not of fear, and that the repressor of the “oedipus complex”, etc., was the mother, not the father. My theoretical standpoint was still dominated by the fate of the Oedipus Complex, but I seemed to be able to get a new and synthetic point of view towards the data of animal behaviour, the evolution of culture and the Psychoses, which Freud had been unable to achieve.

One of Suttie’s colleagues wrote that he was prone to excessive vigour in his disputes, possibly to the point at which he antagonised people who might have become allies. This is apparent in the chapter “Freudian Theory is Itself a Disease”, which must have caused a great deal of angst among the Freudians. His critique took two main lines, first to show the same general tendency in all the other errors—namely the tendency towards denial of love and the role of the mother. Then he argued that Freudian practice, to the extent that it was helpful, actually contradicted Freudian theory.

He noted the following deficiencies in Freud and his theories:

1. Freud’s cold and puritanical nature intruded and distorted his interpretation of his clinical observations. It is most unfortunate that the man who wrote so much about sex admitted that he was himself unable to experience the “the oceanic feeling” of loving union with another person.

2. Freud’s personal biases intruded into his interpretation of data from Ethnology and Anthropology.

3. The notion of the Death Instinct was radically misconceived, likewise Freud’s tortured attempt to explain the origin of human society. In Suttie’s view, humans evolved from social animals so there is no need to postulate uniquely human propensities for social life.

4. The Freudian concept of love could not escape from his “defiant, pessimistic antipathetic attitude of mind”. Freud’s theories on fear and repression convey the impression that he saw no positive drives in life; instead he saw the individual as driven by environmental compulsion (against the will-to-death), politics as the domination of the masses by feared leaders, cultural achievements as the redirection of sexual or destructive energies etc.

5. “Freud conceives of all motive (a) as a ‘letting off of steam’, an evacuation or detensioning, and (b) as a quest for sensory gratification … Against this I regard expression not as an outpouring for its own sake, but as an overture demanding response from the other.”

For Suttie the great challenge of early child development is separation from the mother, because if this is badly handled the person may exhibit lifelong bad habits in personal relations and may even develop clinical conditions. By the same token, the main task of youth and adolescence is coming to terms with independence from the mother and also from the father, who is likely to be perceived as the figure of authority, depending on the culture and the family situation.

What Suttie called the “Crisis of Anxiety” occurs when the infant discovers that the benevolence of others (especially the most significant other, the mother) can be whimsical or conditional, or its own offerings may be criticised and rejected. He agreed with Adler that the choice of adaptation to this challenge can establish a lifelong pattern of behaviour in personal relationships and he postulated four typical patterns where the “crisis” is not handled well.

1. The preservation of the lovableness of the mother, at the expense of taking on board a load of guilt: “She is kind and good, if she does not love me that is because I am bad.”

2. Regression to babyhood, illness or dependency: “I will be a baby again, because mother is only kind to babies” or, “Kiss it and make it well” or “Mother nurses sick people as though they are babies”.

3. Renouncing mother: “You are bad, I will get a better mother than you”. This can lead to adoption of the father or someone else, or maybe a religion or an ideology, as a surrogate mother.

4. Substituting power to demand attention in place of the spontaneous and free love of infancy: “You must love me or fear me; I will bite you and not love you until you do as I wish.” Delinquency and other forms of attention-seeking behaviour can evolve from this technique.

He described the companionship that the child experiences with the mother as a “need for company” which can cause desolation when that reassuring figure is not there when required. Healthy development is a matter of achieving independence from the mother in gradual stages so that other people and activities take her place to absorb the attention and the energies of the growing person. Suttie would have loved the experiments conducted years later by Harlow with monkeys where the youngsters could be seen venturing further and further from the mother, darting back at any sign of danger or threat, then venturing forth again, encouraged by a touch or a reassuring signal from the mother:

I think that play, cooperation, competition, and culture-interests generally are substitutes for the mutually caressing relationship of child and mother. By these substitutes we put the whole social environment in the place once occupied by mother—maintaining with it a mental or cultural rapport in lieu of the bodily relationship of caresses, etc., formerly enjoyed with the mother … This is my view of the process of sublimation; but it differs very greatly from that of Freud and his enormous “team” of expert specialists. As far as anyone can tell, Freud considers that the infant’s desires for the mother, and the gratification it receives from her, are of a sexual nature.

Suttie would have also appreciated the modern body of research on play and its role in the development of skills and sociability. He wrote, “Necessity is not ‘the mother of invention’; Play is.” He considered that play is a necessity, not merely to develop physical and mental skills but also to provide reassuring contacts with other people to replace the nurturing function of the mother. Conversation, for example, is a kind of mental play. He also wrote that people rarely outgrow the need for bodily contacts, quite apart from sex: “Many [one might suggest most, if not all] adults retain the need for caresses apart from sexual intentions and gratifications.”

One of Suttie’s most intriguing speculations concerns what he called the “Need to Give”, which he regarded as either an instinct or a pattern that is established in the early relationship with loving parents. He considered that this need, like every other need, brings anxiety when it is frustrated:

Non-appetitive “interest” combines with need-for-company (they may even have the same origin) to apply the drive to the cultural pursuits of knowledge for its own sake, and to the development of a tradition which can be accumulated indefinitely … the period between infancy and adulthood appears to me to be dominated by an almost insatiable social need, which uses the plastic energy of human interest for its satisfaction in play. Freud sees this period as one of repression of the (by now definitely genital) sex impulses on account of their incestuous aims. Interest for Freud is just a substitute for or sublimation of sexual yearnings, and friendship is sexuality which has become “goal-inhibited” by the definitely genital wish becoming repressed.

Selfishness and Benevolence

Part of the corrosive cultural legacy of the Freudian movement is a pervasive scepticism about human nature. Perhaps the most striking example is the concept of the Death Instinct. Another is the idea that our anti-social instincts need to be constantly kept in check, either by our own efforts or by the fear of punishment. Suttie challenged the theories of Freud and Adler, which both postulate that the root motive of human life is the “advancement of the individual” in a selfish manner. In contrast with this view, which can be regarded as a kind of secularised version of Original Sin (the ape and tiger in man) Suttie argued that anti-social tendencies may arise from mismanagement of the separation of mother and child (or of some other phase of social development), through excessive haste or the projection of unhelpful anxieties and demands upon the child by the mother or others nearby.

He offered some interesting comments on Cynicism and Asceticism, which he described as the twin offspring of the temperament which is suspicious of other people’s pleasures, especially the pleasure of loving or giving out to someone else:

The cynic observes that amiable behaviour brings pleasure and concludes that it is done for this reason. For him this is merely an inverted form of selfishness and hence worthless. The sole motive that he can see is the pursuit of pleasure in accordance with the demands of one’s own nature. This view finds philosophical expression in Psychological Hedonism. The ascetic, like the cynic, feels that love is not real if it is pleasurable. Self-sacrifice and self-denial for him also are the measure of goodness.

The chapter ends with an appendix on cleanliness and ethics because washing, toilet training and related activities loom so large in the relationship between mother (or surrogates) and child, especially if there is any hint of obsession or compulsion on the part of the carers:

Summing up, we may say that cleanliness training and washing are therefore more important factors in the development of social disposition and interest even than feeding [for a number of reasons] … I judge the function of excretion to have an enormous influence on the very foundation of (social) character. This in no way denies the sensual significance of the functions, called “anal” and “urethral” eroticisms by the Freudians; but it does shift the main emphasis from its organic and sensual meaning to its social significance.

The Taboo on Tenderness

From a non-professional’s point of view, and especially feminists, the taboo on tenderness is possibly the most interesting of Suttie’s ideas:

Features of our mode of upbringing, which I have vaguely generalized as a tenderness taboo, create an artificial mental differentiation and consequent emotional barrier between adult males on the one hand and women and children on the other … It artificially differentiates men from women, making them bad comrades and throwing the women back upon a dependency on their children, thus further widening the breach and aggravating jealousy. But its worst effects lie in separating parent from child.

He suggested that modern science appeared to have an aversion to sentimentality and this has been taken to such absurd lengths in Behaviourism “as to betray an underlying bias of anti-emotionalism”. Freud regarded tenderness as a derivative of sexuality (goal-inhibited), and the aversion towards “softness” extends far beyond psychology to impact on the whole of Western society, or much of it. Suttie instanced many examples to demonstrate the effects of the repression of tenderness: the male “gangs” and “brotherhoods” of all ages where “manliness” is mandatory, contra “babyishness” and “girlishness”; the journalistic admiration of “daring” thieves and “clever” swindlers; the phobia about sentimental feelings between male friends; the low pay of nurses (compensated by a licence for tenderness and care); mockery of “spoony” lovers, “smitten by disease”.

In the theatre, which appeared to be one of Suttie’s major interests, he suggested that refuge from tender feelings and pathos was sought in sex and that this flight is expressed in some people’s intolerance of “good” music (in favour of “jazz excitement”). In more recent times one might instance the “flight” from the saccharine, asexual world of Mary Poppins to the rather different world of James Bond.

Suttie traced the root of this problem with sentimentality back to the way in which separation anxiety is handled. The progressive separation from the mother has to be matched with increased resources of companionship and play-interests with others. He noted the tendency for bad practice to be cumulative from one generation to the next.

His cross-cultural studies are revealing, and amusing:

We actually find, for example, that the taboo on friendly relations can become explicit even while sexual indulgence is regarded as harmless. Professor Malinowski reports of the Trobriand Islanders that while it is quite in order for a girl to sleep with her lover, it is regarded as improper for her to be too friendly (e.g. to prepare food) before marriage. They regard this very much as we are supposed to regard pre-marital intercourse. If their civilization were like ours presumably they would consider a restaurant bill good grounds for divorce; the Sunday papers would print the menu and the Bishops would talk of the decay of morality and the dangers of neo-paganism. Still they do not carry the taboo on tenderness anything like as far as their neighbours and trading relatives the Dobuans, whose ideals of civic conduct would qualify them for Broadmoor Prison even in this country. This latter people profess an ethical attitude that would justify the Freudian metapsychology. They consider the only worthwhile object in life is to get the better of your neighbours and the only means of doing so are force, fraud, and sex-appeal.

Psychotherapy

Suttie addressed the question of whether psychotherapy is a teachable technique or essentially a matter of human relationships based on rapport between patient and therapist. He leaned towards the “rapport” position although he emphasised that the therapy should logically depend on our theory about the nature of the illness. He believed the growing consensus of opinion supported the view that psychopathology is a disturbance in the love life (personal relations in the broader sense). He suggested that each of the nine or ten theories of therapy that are worth considering represent an aspect of the truth. He identified three broad schools of thought.

1. Methods that represent a flight from feeling into intellectual or philosophical “solutions”. These deal in “explanations”, “insight”, “recovery of memories”, “occupation and distraction”. These all spare the therapist the problem of understanding in depth.

2. The therapeutic application of authority and “patronising” love. These methods include “persuasion”, suggestion, hypnosis, “confession and absolution”, all aiming to coerce the patient into normality. Suttie dismissed these because they did not deal with deeper issues or help the patient to grow up.

3.The Freudian and neo-Freudian methods. These are more interested in deep causes and more sympathetic towards the patient.

Suttie concluded that the common factor in all effective therapies is the quest for a basis of companionship with the patient, though there are major differences in theories of causation and cure. There is also a big question mark over the success of therapy, compared with the spontaneous remission rate of symptoms (that is, no therapy at all).

Suttie devoted a chapter to the theme that Freudian practice is “Cure by Love”, claiming that any success achieved by Freudian therapy cannot be attributed to the theory itself, but to its unwitting dependence on forces and principles that it does not even acknowledge.

The Aftermath

Due to his untimely death and the absence of the second book which was planned to develop his ideas in more depth, Suttie’s influence had to be exerted by others. It also had to beat against the tide of the domination of orthodoxy in the profession. The result is that Suttie is very much an unsung hero.

One of his followers is John Bowlby, who wrote extensively on attachment and loss (of the mother). This work was located in a strand of thought that branched from the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory and became known as the “object relations” theory. This depicts the central drama of early life as the relationship with the mother and the negotiation of the separation from the mother after the early period of intimacy. Other pioneers in this movement were Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest and John Hadfield in London. This deviation was bitterly resisted by the mainstream Freudians, whose control over theoretical and practical development in the field appears to be one of the great scientific scandals of recent times.

Rafe Champion is a Sydney writer who has a website at www.the-rathouse.com. The Origins of Love and Hate by Ian D. Suttie is currently published by Free Association Books of London, at £18.95.