Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

46 Ibid., p. 16, (Suttie’s emphasis).
47 Ibid., p. 18.
48 Ibid., p. 22.
49 Ibid., p. 49.
50 Ibid., p. 50.
51 Ibid., p. 53.
the first relationship, the bond between infant and mother. Suttie says that “[b]y
these substitutes we put the whole social environment in the place once occupied
by mother.”46
Suttie is at odds with Thomas Hobbes and the later Enlightenment thinkers, who
argued that material self-interest is the guiding moti vation of human beings.
Instead, Suttie argues, like Johan Huizinga and others, that play is the most important
social activity because it is where we create companionship, engender trust, and
exercise human imagination and individual creativity. Play is where we overcome our
sense of existential loneliness and recapture the feeling of companion ship we first
discovered with our primordial playmates, our mothers.47 Suttie bolsters his claim
that companionship and play are essential to becoming a human being by pointing
out that
the period between infancy and adulthood … [is] … dominated by an almost
insatiable social need, which uses the plastic energy of human interest for its
satisfaction in play.48
Unlike Freud, who viewed tenderness as a weak sublimation of sex ual arousal, Suttie
saw it as a primary force that manifests itself from the very beginning of life. His
notion of “tenderness” overlaps with Kohut’s ideas on the importance of the empathic
bond in the creation of social relations.
Suttie dismisses the idea that all human relations – even among infants – are driven
by the quest to assert power over one another. While such behavior exists as some
infants mature into childhood, it represents a secondary impulse arising from a deficit
in tender reci procity in the very first social relationship with a mother. Suttie says
that to believe that a very young infant is aware of a sense of gain or loss of power in
his or her relationship with the mother before he has even developed a rudimentary
consciousness of self is absurd. This is because
[t]he primal state is not one of omnipotence, for omnipotence implies the consciousness
of self as distinct from mother, which differentiation (as is known) cannot exist
in early infancy. Prior to this differentiation of the self from the not self, as I have
shown, there can be no question of power, nor a conflict of interest or wish nor any
awareness of the distinction between gain or loss. The interactions between mother
and infant are entirely pleasurable or unpleasurable and convey no sense of advantage
or defeat to either side.49
It is only when the mother refuses to give herself to the infant or rejects gestures of
affection or gifts from the baby that “anxiety, hate, aggression (which Freud mistakes
for a primary instinct), and the quest for power” begin to manifest themselves.50
The infant begins life, then, according to Suttie, with an inchoate but nonetheless
instinctual need to receive as weIl as give gifts, which is the basis of all affection.
Reciprocity is the heart of sociality and what relationships are built on. If reciprocity is
blocked, the development of selfhood and sociability is stunted and psychopathology
emerges.51
The most social animal
While object relationship theorists like Fairbairn, Kohut, Winnicott, and Suttie were
raising the hackles of traditional Freudian analysts with their belief that babies are
prewired for companionship and sociability rather than driven by sexual libido, other
researchers, often working independently of one another, were coming to the same