Concept
Effort to drive the other person crazy
Harold Searles's 1959 account of the ways one person, knowingly or not, undermines another's confidence in their own emotional reactions and their own perception of reality. Examples include switching abruptly between emotional wavelengths while discussing the same subject, or keeping one wavelength while jumping between matters of life and death and trivial ones. He proposed this as one element in the origins of schizophrenia within the family. He also found that patient and therapist make such efforts toward each other in treatment, and held that the therapist must endure and understand them rather than retaliate.
Read more- Introduced by
- Harold Searles
- Key works
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introduced by
- Harold Searles 1959 Searles's 1959 paper in the British Journal of Medical Psychology, reprinted in his Collected Papers (1965). It treats the effort to undermine another person's trust in their own feelings and perceptions as an element both in the aetiology of schizophrenia and in its psychotherapy.