[3] Ambivalence was the term borrowed by Sigmund Freud to indicate the simultaneous presence of love and hate towards the same object.
The boy's attachment to his mother becomes stronger, and he starts developing negative feelings of rivalry and hostility toward the father.
In order to lessen the anxiety, the child activates the defense mechanism of identification, and identifies with the parent of the same sex.
According to Freud, ambivalence is the precondition for melancholia, together with loss of a loved object, oral regression and discharge of the aggression toward the self.
The object relations theory of Melanie Klein pivoted around the importance of love and hate, concern for and destruction of others, from infancy onwards.
[9] Klein stressed the importance of inborn aggression as a reflection of the death drive and talked about the battle of love and hatred throughout the life span.
[12] Ian Dishart Suttie (1898-1935) wrote the book The Origins of Love and Hate, which was first published in 1935, a few days after his death.
[dubious – discuss] It has been often cited and makes a contribution towards understanding the more difficult aspects of family relationships and friendships.
[citation needed] He can be seen as one of the first significant object relations theorists and his ideas anticipated the concepts put forward by modern self psychologists.
Secondly, Ian Suttie explained anxiety and neurotic maladjustment, as a reaction on the failure of finding a response for this sociability; when primary social love and tenderness fails to find the response it seeks, the arisen frustration will produce a kind of separation anxiety.
This view is more clearly illustrated by a piece of writing of Suttie himself: ‘Instead of an armament of instincts, latent or otherwise, the child is born with a simple attachment-to-mother who is the sole source of food and protection… the need for a mother is primarily presented to the child mind as a need for company and as a discomfort in isolation’.
In the explanation of the love and hate relationship by Ian Suttie, the focus, not surprisingly, lies in relations and the social environment.
The newborn baby is not able to distinguish the self from others and the relationship with the mother is symbiotic, with the two individuals forming a unique object.
This ambivalence results in a vacillation between attitudes of passive dependency on the omnipotent mother and aggressive strivings for self expansion and control over the love object.
Hence, frustration, demands and restrictions imposed by parents within normal bounds, reinforce the process of discovery and distinction of the object and the self.
When early experiences of severe disappointment and abandonment have prevented the building up of un-ambivalent object relations and stable identifications and weakened the child's self-esteem, they may result in ambivalence conflict in adulthood, which in turn causes depressive states.