Suttie’s Influence on Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory

Abstract

It is suggested here that Ian Suttie influenced W. R. D. Fairbairn directly through a 1939 reprint of his The Origins of Love and Hate, a heavily underlined copy of which was found by the author in Fairbairn's library in the University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections in October 2009. Underlined sections of the book are compared with significant aspects of Fairbairn's post-1940 theorizing, and the similarities are argued to be due to Fairbairn's adopting many of the underlying attitudes and ideas that Suttie developed. This leaves Fairbairn's structural theory, which he began to develop as a rational reconstruction of Freud's structural theory as early as 1927, dependent in part on such theory but independent of direct influence by Suttie. It is argued that Suttie's importance vis-à-vis British object relations thinking needs to be reassessed.

Christian anti-Judaism and early object relations theory

“…Unfortunately, with Suttie, stultifying diatribe substitutes for critical argument. It is baffling that Suttie’s work can inspire any scholar to advocate reclaiming him as the (sadly forgotten) originator of object relations theory; to hail his book as a “classic” that “contains virtually every idea” (Rudnytsky, 1991: 6) elaborated by later psychoanalysis; to describe his book as a “pioneering critique of psychoanalysis” (Heaton, 1989: 128); or to champion his “pioneering work, the history of his influence, and his role as perhaps the originator of an alternative strand of object relations thinking [that] merits our further attention” (Clarke, 2011: 955). Such hyperbolic praise for a book that bursts with overwrought polemics and blatantly distasteful and distorted views of Jews and Judaism is astonishing.…”

“…The assumption that object relations theory began with Fairbairn has now been contested. More recent scholarship (Rudnytsky, 1991;Beattie, 2003;Hoffman, 2004;Clarke, 2008;Miller, 2008) argues that Fairbairn's fundamental challenge to Freudian drive theory was either influenced by and/or directly borrowed from (Clarke, 2011) Ian Dishart Suttie's ([1935] 1966) posthumously published The Origins of Love and Hate. Curiously, Fairbairn does not acknowledge his indebtedness to Suttie.…”