Reviews and Notices of Books

Abstract

The Origins of Love and Hate. By Ian F. Suttie, M.D. With a preface by Dr. J. A. Hadfield. London: Kegan Paul. 1935. Pp. 275. Price lOs. 6d. net. DR. IAN SUTTIE has been a contributor to this JOURNAL in days gone by, and his numerous articles on psychopathology have shown him to be possessed of a well-stored and critical mind. These features are seen in the reasoned and animated criticism with which he here assails Freudian theory. He adduces evidence to show that Freudian theory has from the outset been coloured by the temperament of Freud himself; from Freud's own lips Dr. Suttie illustrates a ' specially inexorable repression ' that has resulted in a grudge against mothers and a mind-blindness for love. Mother attachments of the individual are, for Freud, 'lost in a past dim and shadowy,' and the Mother-Cults of antiquity are for him a repellant and insoluble mystery. In temperate language and with incisive argument Dr. Suttie proceeds to exemplify this bias on the part of the founder of the theory-a bias of which others have been aware and which, unfortunately, has reproduced itself in not a few of his disciples. It has found perhaps its crudest expression in such a statement as 'Every mother is her child's first seductress '-an opinion so monstrous as to prove of itself that its originator is incapable of understanding what maternal love means. It is good indeed that someone has been found who is so well equipped as Dr. Suttie to cross swords with the exponents of ill-considered views of the kind. But there is much more than destructive criticism of Freudian theory in this finely written work, in which the meaning, psychology, function and expression of love are constructively discussed with scientific insight and a large measure of sound common sense. Love is, properly, separated and distinguished from appetite and desire, and cultural interest is shown to be something very different from substitute sex gratification.