Wittgenstein and Freud

Ian Dishart Suttie was a Scottish psychoanalyst who died in 1935, shortly after completing a powerful critique of Freud, entitled The Origins of Love and Hate. Whereas Freud presents the individual as caught between a hostile external world and a maelstrom of internal excitations, Suttie claims that we are born with a need for love and an instinctive desire to please. Evolutionarily adapted to our long period of dependency, our drive for self-preservation takes the form of a dependent love for the mother, which gradually expands into a broader need for companionship and an interest in sharing our thoughts and feelings with others. Pace Freud (and the philosophers that influenced him), we are not isolates who struggle to acknowledge (and get anything positive from) the existence of others; we are social beings whose greatest joy lies in contact with others and whose greatest fear is loneliness and isolation.

Suttie’s argument generates multiple challenges to Freud. In his view, repression is a function of love, not fear. The child’s sexual interest in the mother is not repressed because it would upset the feared and hated father but because it would upset the idealised and tenderly loved mother. In some societies, however, the mother’s own need for love is inadequately met, which leads her either to suppress her child’s tender affections or to seek refuge in them. The father’s jealousy then leads him to intervene and place himself between the child and its mother. However, the child’s (sexual) desires later return, leading to enduring rivalry with the father and a view of love as a sex-related desire for possession and control. Only in these patriarchal societies is the Oedipus complex such a big issue. In fact, Suttie sees two other types of jealousy as more important than sexual rivalry – the child’s jealousy of its mother’s love for her other children, and the father’s jealousy of his wife as the creator and sustainer of life (“Zeus jealousy” related to the mother with child, “Laios jealousy” related to the mother and child). Living in the society he did, however, Freud saw everything through the (distorted) prism of the Oedipus complex.

Like Freud, Suttie grounds his approach in biology. He argues that the exceptionally long period of human dependency shapes instincts that differ from those of other species. In other animals, hate is a negative reaction to a threat. Its meaning is: how dare you threaten my existence? In humans, it is a negative reaction to a negative reaction. Its meaning is: why are you not giving me the love I need? In other animals, fear is an inducement to flee. In humans, it is an inducement to seek support. In contrast with Freud, Suttie believed that love arises from the need for self-preservation, not from sexual desire. The biological need for nurture manifests itself in the mind as a pleasure in responsive companionship (whose correlate is discomfort in loneliness and isolation). Self-expression is not (as Freud suggested) a de-tensioning (an emotional evacuation), but an offering or a stimulus designed to elicit a response. Love is not about satisfying desire, it is about being in harmonious relationships with others. Unfortunately in our society (and in many others), there is a taboo on tenderness, which leads to anxiety, aggression and combative human relations including (and perhaps particularly) those that relate to sex.

The taboo on tenderness plays the same role for Suttie as the incest taboo does for Freud. In Suttie’s view, the repression of tenderness (which the child has enjoyed since birth) is much more painful than the repression of sexuality (which the child has not yet fully engaged in). It strikes at the foundation of the child’s sense of security, leaving it wondering whether it is lovable and whether its need for love will ever be met. When tenderness is not brutally repressed, the child’s need for the mother gradually reduces through an increase in play and a widening circle of companionship. But in a society where tenderness is tabooed, the mother transmits this taboo to her child, who instead focuses on a jealous competitiveness and seeks compensation in power and possessions. The taboo on tenderness undermines good parenting – it prevents parents from interacting freely with their children both because this involves tenderness and because it would involve giving their children something that they missed out on. They end up forcing their children to “grow up” too soon and too quickly. As an adult, the child will not allow others to enjoy what it was deprived of. Instead, it will wage war on tenderness and treat affection as childish. Masculine cultures of this kind also devalue play – the only way it can creep back in is as a competitive form of activity where the individual seek to demonstrate their superiority to others.

Suttie criticises Freud’s theories as an expression of unconscious hate and anxiety, but he has more time for Freudian practice, which he sees as a struggle to express love (in spite of various inhibitions). Initially, the focus was on the analyst being a neutral observer with his feelings kept firmly in check. But then it became clear that the main source of improvement was the relationship between the analyst and the patient, leading to Ferenzi’s claim that it is the physician’s love that heals the patient. Suttie embraces this idea, arguing that psychotherapy is about helping the patient re-establish free “feeling-interest” relationships with other people with this process starting in their relationship with the analyst. In this way, the analyst replays the role of the mother, providing the starting point for a broadening circle of relationships where the feelings and thoughts of others can be freely responded to.

Suttie’s early death prevented him from developing the ideas in his book and from acquiring followers to build on his thinking. But he did have a significant influence on Fairburn, Bowlby and Winnicott. I find his attempt to put love at the heart of theory fascinating, and I like his rejection of the (mistaken) assumption that all human action must be explained in terms of the individual’s desire to maximise their own satisfaction. I think he is right to supplement Freud’s emphasis on sexual rivalry with a recognition of love jealousy in relation to the mother (felt by siblings but also potentially by the father) and with a recognition of the father’s jealousy of the mother’s role as creator and sustainer of life. I also like Suttie’s account of culture, art and religion, which I find more convincing than that of Winnicott, who challenges the traditional philosophical Subject-Object dichotomy but (in my view) does not quite manage to break free from it. 

But are Suttie’s theories true?  This is not as straightforward a question as it seems. Psychoanalytic theories are manifestly different from scientific theories. While Freud continually changed his theories, his tragic view of the human condition remained a constant throughout his life. His theories form part of a way of understanding the world that makes him more akin to a philosopher than to a natural scientist. In my view, psychoanalytical “theories” offer frameworks for making sense of human feelings, thoughts and actions. They generate powerful insights (true statements) in relation to the specific individuals but also more broadly. However, I do not think the different theories will ever be brought together into a grand theory of everything that provides the ultimate truth on human thoughts, feelings and actions. I can understand that many analysts find it helpful (perhaps even necessary) to work mainly within one theoretical framework, but I think a certain amount of flexibility and eclecticism makes sense. The analyst is trying to understand and help the person in the room with them and ultimately what matters is what works.

But it is not just a matter of pragmatism. When we try to understand people in everyday life, our approach is based on recognising the uniqueness of the person we are trying to understand. I want to understand why my friend Simon did what he did, not why people in general would do what he did or even why most people similar to him would act in the way he did. I want to understand the unique person I value, not make progress towards a law-like set of generalisations. It may be argued that we are not unique in a real (as opposed to a trivial) sense, and I certainly would not want to place any arbitrary limits on the scientific project of searching for patterns and regularities, but human beings are not billiard balls and in seeking to understand them, our primary interest is in the particular rather than the general. 

An equally, or perhaps even more, fundamental point is that our judgements about people’s actions (motives and feelings etc) involve taking up a position in relation to them. Should John’s suicide be seen as a violent attack on the world or as a guilt-filled recognition that he made some terrible mistakes? The truth is hard to determine not just because John was unique but because any conclusion involves judging his action and taking up a position on the sort of person he was. Specific judgements about human actions and even more generalisations are always going to be contestable. In discussing them, we are likely to find ourselves saying: I find your judgement/generalisation unduly negative or unduly positive. People are worse/better than you think.

For theses reasons, I don’t think psychoanalytic theories are (or can be) straightforwardly true or false. They can be used to generate specific or general claims that can be true or false (in someone’s opinion), but it makes no sense to hope that one day we will establish a definitive theory. They are attempts to make sense of people, similar to philosophical attempts to make sense of the world. The “theories” reflect the personalities of their creators. While Freud comes over as tragically pessimistic, a hard-nosed scientist who had difficulty accepting that he belonged to the species he was studying, Suttie comes over as a romantic optimistic, a passionate man seeking to bring human warmth into the temple of science.