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The author of this book has contributed from time to time to the literature some very suggestive papers and he now finally combines the result of some considerable number of years of thinking along psychotherapeutic lines in a systematic statement of his position. The book is admittedly an abbreviated and preliminary statement intended to be followed by another work; but unfortunately in the meantime the author departed this life, and we will have to get what we can from the statement as it is included in this communication.
Briefly speaking, Dr. Suttie has been a psychotherapist for, I believe, some twenty years. He was originally an ardent disciple of the Freudian theories and practice, but as time went on these theories particularly became less and less satisfactory to him and he emancipated himself from their control and undertook to give independent thought and consideration to the neurotic and psychotic material with which he dealt and to elaborate ideas that would be more satisfactory to him than the Freudian ideas.
Again briefly speaking, his divisions and modifications of the Freudian theory do not essentially alter very much of what has already been accomplished under the aegis of those ideas and practices. He particularly believes that the practice of the Freudians is better than their preachments, and that in their effort to explain the results of their practice they have built up a mass of more or less self-contradictory, useless and burdensome theories and hypotheses. He accounts for this, in large part at least, as a result of the failure of the whole Freudian ideology to give adequate appreciation to the significance of the part of the mother and correspondingly to emphasize the part of the father in the evolution and development of the child mind; and this he accounts for by the fact that Freud, being a Jew and therefore brought up in the beliefs and traditions of his race, which are essentially patriarchal in character, has naturally and unconsciousl