The Origins of Love and Hate by Ian Suttie

"In fact it seems to me (in moments of enthusiasm) that they [primary assumptions in this book] reintroduce common sense into the science of psychology."

This is the last sentence of the book and resonates with how I felt about the whole work. Psychology predates the word as it seems to be an attempt to understand and explain the human person. I have always liked the way that Walker Percy points out the fact that psychology and sociology are very much soft sciences ... we are still working on fundamental assumptions and there is no unifying theories (but hundreds of schools of psychology). This is certainly the most technical psychology book I have ever read, but interestingly it is a technical explanation of love as the foundation of human life.

Suttie, in opposition to Freud mainly, as well as Adler, argues for the existence of love, of the need for sociology and psychology to come together, for a definition of love does not have to be sexualized, toward an understanding of the human person from infancy and the interaction between mother and child.

He also talks about science betraying an “underlying bias of anti-emotionalism.” This brings us to his point that society, besides its taboo on sexuality [Freud], has a taboo on tenderness. This is seen from the language among boys about each other when they fall short: baby, girly, etc. “Expressions of liking and esteem have actually to be disguised more carefully than a smutty joke. One very common ‘cover’ for expression of warm or tender feeling is mock abuse.” He makes the further comment “even Christianity is stigmatized as weak and childish since it avowedly cultivates tender sentiments.”

And this gets at the very root of his analysis of Western civilization’s impending crisis: love hunger. “Basically in explaining early infant mother relationship you must talk of weaning and the importance of the weaning process. If this weaning is taken to be the withdrawal of love then it can lead to a “protective indifference, essentially a ‘sour grapes’ kind of self-comfort --a self-insulation from love hunger by the cultivation of a loveshyness--but it demands a psychic blindness to pathos of any kind--a refusal to participate in emotion.”

This is huge. There was a book from the 50s by a Freudean analyst (and Jesuit priest) called Flight from Women (Karl Stern) which argued that Western culture had, in large part, left sophia and pathos in pursuit of a kind cold logical reason. CS Lewis in his Abolition of Man talks about men without chests and points out that magic and science were actually twins, its just that science lived on, while magic died out. They both involve killing for knowledge and power.

Suttie also says this taboo on tenderness “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 concludes by, in short form, saying that Freudian theory doesn’t make sense of reality and isn’t even compatible with its own practice (hence it is not empirical or scientific). He says that the “physician’s role is not the technical one of doctor nor even the godlike one of perfect parent. It is much more that of sacrificial victim upon whom all hates, anxieties, and distrust are worked out, so that he is mediator, the catalyte--whereby the separated psyche is re-integrated in its society.”