The Origins of Love and Hate has long had an underground reputation within psychoanalysis. It is one of the most passionate arguments for a therapeutic practice based on the physician's love for the deeply deprived patient. It also advocates a view of human nature congruent with the findings of modern biology - a more optimistic vision than that of traditional Freudian psychology. The book is a powerful and early critique of the dual instinct theory of psychoanalysis - Eros and Thantos.
Ian Suttie was a Scottish psychiatrist who became a full member of the Tavistock clinic in the 1930s. This book -full of most original (some would say maverick) ideas - was written at the same time as Freud was writing his last works on culture, and a new perspective on therapy was being evolved by the pioneers of child psychoanalysis.
