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.
Development
1959
introduced by Harold Searles
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.
In Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (1965);The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy: An Element in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (1959)
Relations
- 1959 introduced by Harold Searles
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.
Works
- 1965
Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects
Harold F. Searles's first book gathers some two dozen papers he wrote between 1951 and 1963, most of them during his years at Chestnut Lodge, on the intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy of chronic schizophrenia and on related clinical questions. Published in 1965 by International Universities Press in New York and by the Hogarth Press in the International Psycho-Analytical Library in London, with a preface by Robert P. Knight, and later reissued in the Maresfield Library, the volume is arranged chronologically, so that it traces the gradual evolution of Searles's thinking. Its papers range from early studies of incorporation, perplexity and vengefulness, through the patient's vulnerability to the therapist's unconscious processes, oedipal love in the countertransference, the effort to drive the other person crazy, integration and differentiation, sexuality, anxiety about change and death, and schizophrenic communication, to later papers on the phases of patient–therapist interaction, concrete and metaphorical thinking, neutral therapist responses, transference psychosis and psychoanalytic supervision. Throughout, Searles treats the therapist's own feelings as a primary source of clinical information and the relationship between patient and therapist as the medium of change.
See also
People
References
- Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects1965Evidence for a relation
- The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy: An Element in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia1959Evidence for a relation