Introduction
Within Fairbairn scholarship there is a consensus that Fairbairn made a creative breakthrough in the early 1940s when his psychology of dynamic structureâa consistent object relations approach to psychoanalytic theoryâwas developed in a number of papers (1940, 1941, 1943a, 1944). However, explanatory accounts of this âcreative stepâ (Sutherland, 1989) are less clear and on this matter there is no general consensus.
The relationship between the work of Fairbairn and that of his fellow Scot, Ian D. Suttie, is generally recognised to be significant where Suttie is regarded as having âanticipatedâ (Grotstein 1998; Guntrip 1971; Harrow 1998; Kirkwood 2005; Robbins 1994) and influenced Fairbairn. However, there is little objective evidence for this, since nowhere in his work does Fairbairn mention Suttie, or his only book The origins of Love and hate (OLH), which was first published in 1935. This might have been thought remarkable in itself, given these two menâs Scottish origins and the nature of their theories but, perhaps more importantly, there is no mention of the relationship between Suttie and Fairbairn in Pereira and Scharffâs Fairbairn and Relational Theory (1989) or in Birtles and Scharffâs invaluable two volume From instinct to Self (1994). Nor is there any mention of Suttie in either of two books that deal exclusively with the Independents within the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPS)âGregory Kohonâs The British School of Psychoanalysis: The independent Tradition (1986), and Eric Raynerâs The independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (1991). This may be accurate in the sense that Suttie, a psychiatrist, was not a member of the BPS but it is nevertheless surprising given the influence he has been said to have on many of the IndependentsâFairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, and others (see below).
I believe I have found a significant clue as to Suttieâs influence on Fairbairnâs object relations theory in Fairbairnâs heavily underlined copy of a 1939 edition of Suttieâs book.
While researching aspects of Fairbairnâs theory I approached the University of Edinburgh Library (UEL) concerning an archive of Fairbairnâs papers. In the course of this enquiry I asked about Fairbairnâs library, which I had been told by Fairbairnâs daughter, Ellinor (personal communication), was also held in Scotland. Ann Henderson, a librarian at UEL found that there was a collection of books, believed to be Fairbairnâs library, held by UEL and I was directed to the Special Collections where Joseph Marshall and Tricia Boyd were very helpful in helping me locate the, at that time, uncatalogued, collection of books and provided access to them on a visit I made to Edinburgh in October 2009. According to the printed plate inside the front cover of each of these approximately two hundred and eighty books, they were from the library of W. R. D. Fairbairn âA Pioneer of Psychoanalysisâ and had been donated by his son, the late Nicholas Fairbairn M.P. (1933â1995).
I suggest that it was Fairbairnâs study of this copy of Suttieâs book that helped to prompt the âcreative stepâ that led to Fairbairnâs ground-breaking papers of the 1940s. When one compares the underlined parts of Suttieâs text with Fairbairnâs development of his psychology of dynamic structure the influence is obvious, as I illustrate below. However, to be clear, this is only one root of Fairbairnâs thinking and does not account for the structural aspects of his mature theory, which Fairbairn had been developing since the late 1920s (1927, 1931).
Many passages in Suttieâs book are underlined in the characteristic way that Fairbairn marked the books he studied. There are several other books in the collection underlined in exactly the same way. In Suttieâs book the underlinings include parts of (a) J. A. Hadfieldâs introduction, (b) the actual introduction and (c) the first four chapters of the book plus (d) two other later sections. These appear to be quite deliberate (see below for an example) and concern ideas that provide an armature for Fairbairnâs developed object relations theory. I think that Fairbairnâs close study of this book was instrumental in his making the âcreative stepâ in his papers of the 1940s. The existence of this link back through the Independent grouping of the BPS to Suttie and before him to Rank and Ferenczi (1925) and back to the object relations based work of Freud provides an alternative âtraditionâ of object relations thinking to that traced back through Klein. Padel (1985, 1991) noted that one root of object relations thinking can be found in Freudâs paper on narcissism, where the infant is described as internalising the nursing couple and subsequently identifying with one or other side of that relationship in making a choice of object. This, combined with the fact that both Klein and Fairbairn take the super-ego, of Freudâs structural theory, to be the exemplar of an internal object, suggests that the full description of the development of object relations thinking goes back at least as far as Freud himself, whose Group Psychology is regarded by Padel (1985) as a good example of object relations thinkingâin particular, in the case of group formation, where âa number of individuals ⌠have put one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their egoâ (Padel, 1985 quoting Freud). Ogden (2002) also argues that Freud was developing an object relations approach in his paper on the origins of object relations thinking (Mourning and Melancholia), which he explicitly associates with Fairbairn.
A brief example
The following (complete) paragraph from page three of Suttieâs book shows a typical marking that Fairbairn makes to Suttieâs text. Fairbairnâs underlinings are reproduced.
When I began my studies of social behaviour twenty years ago, however, I never imagined that I would come to attempt to put the conception of altruistic (non-appetitive) love on a scientific footing. Rejecting the âad hocâ and therefore sterile hypothesis of a âherd instinctâ both on biological and methodological grounds, (A) I was nevertheless early compelled to recognise that the psychoses are essentially disorders of the social disposition; (B) and that all our theories of the construction of the social group are seriously inadequate. (G) Five years ago, however, I realised that the infant differs more from our primitive ancestors than we adults do, in spite of Recapitulation Theories (C, D, E) and that this adaptation to infancy (as I called it) implies an innate disposition towards the social habit though not towards a âHerd Instinctâ. (F) Nurture of the young and âthe social habitâ appeared to me associated with each other, and with the replacement of blind instinct by intelligence, in their actual distribution throughout the Animal Kingdom (G). (Suttie, 1935, p. 3)
Suttie and Fairbairn: an overview
Before proceeding to a detailed comparison of Fairbairnâs markings of Suttieâs text with Fairbairnâs mature theory I want to try to contextualise the relationship between Suttie and Fairbairn as it appears today.
Ian Dishart Suttieâs book The Origins of Love and Hate has been widely influential among the British Object Relations group (the Middle Group or Independents) and explicitly acknowledged as such by Winnicott and Bowlby. Commentators have drawn attention to the importance of Suttieâs work for this group (Akhtar, 1999; Beattie, 2003; Bowlby, 1960; Hoffman, 2004; Skolnick, 2006; Tolmacz, 2006; Wallerstein, 1988) and Bacal in particular:
I would like to begin this survey of object-relations theorists with Ian Suttie, who was a central figure in the early Tavistock group ⌠and whose ideas significantly anticipated the work of Fairbairn, Guntrip, Balint and Winnicott ⌠(Bacal, 1987, p. 82)
Rudnytsky (1992) also has a very clear view of Suttieâs, mostly unacknowledged, importance.
In assessing both the historical unfolding and the theoretical achievement of object relations thought, special mention must be made of Ian Suttieâs Origins of Love and Hate (1935). This book, largely neglected at the time of its publication, has increasingly been hailed as a classic and indeed contains the kernel of virtually every idea elaborated by subsequent analysts. (Rudnytsky, 1992, p. 294)
The importance of Suttieâs work is becoming recognised and discussed in a wider context where some of the most interesting work on British object relations thinking is taking place (Gerson 2004, 2009; Miller 2007, 2008a, 2008b) but unfortunately Suttie remains outside the psychoanalytic mainstream. For instance The origins of Love and hate is not among the books in the PEPWeb database, and where Suttie does appear in the journal papers in PEPWeb there is little substantive discussion of his work and his influence is stated briefly rather than argued in any depth.
While Fairbairn is regarded by synoptic reviewers of object relations thinking as the most thoroughgoing developer of that mode of thinking, it is significant that neither Mitchell and Greenberg (1983) nor Judith Hughes (1989) have any indexed references to Suttie, or any discussion of his work or influence. This lack of reference to Suttie is also true of Frank Summersâ object Relations Theories and Psychopathology (1994) and of Otto Kernbergâs object Relations and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1981) and Internal world and External Reality (1984). In the latter there is a full chapter on Fairbairn but no mention of Suttie.
Scharff and Birtles (1997) have argued for the widespread but generally unacknowledged influence that Fairbairnâs theory has had on psychoanalytic theory in the U.K. and the U.S.A. and Migone also makes the point that object relations theory has had a wide and generally unacknowledged influence.
But the developments of Self Psychology are not an isolated phenomenon. They belong to a wider transformation of contemporary psychoanalysis: the latter is increasingly influenced by the so called âobject relation theoryâ [sic]. Today this is probably the most fashionable psychoanalytic school on both continents. Its principal characteristic is an emphasis on environment and on the development of early interpersonal relationships. This school in Great Britain was anticipated by the pioneering work of Suttie. Later it was developed by Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicottâs âmiddle groupâ. Then it was exported to the United States where it was âgraftedâ on to Ego Psychology and as such was spread by Kernberg and other authors who had been exposed to Kleinian theory. (Migone, 1994, p. 90)
Sutherland argues in his biography that Fairbairnâs Freudian views on aggression in 1938 (Sutherland, 1989, p. 58), which are in marked contrast to his views a few year later, are due to internecine struggles over metapsychology in Edinburgh, but it would seem simpler to conclude that, after studying Suttie, Fairbairn changed his mind and made some of Suttieâs approach his own. Sutherland did comment on Suttieâs book and Fairbairnâs relationship to it although this comment is not referenced in the index of his biography of Fairbairn.
Fairbairnâs views in some measure were anticipated by Suttie in his book The Origins of Love and Hate (1935). This book was known to him, and he thought it important. For Fairbairn, however, Suttieâs arguments were apparently couched too much as a general protest without the carefully assembled clinical data and structural theory requiredâa view that was s...