Concept
Nonhuman environment
Harold Searles's thesis, set out in his 1960 book, that the nonhuman surroundings of a person's life, such as animals, plants, landscape and things, are not a neutral backdrop. He held them to be one of the basic ingredients of psychological existence. Everyone has a conscious or unconscious relatedness to this environment, and it is ambivalent: ignoring it carries a cost to one's well-being. In development the child must come to tell itself apart from the nonhuman world as well as from other people. In schizophrenia this differentiation is disturbed, as in feeling oneself to be nonhuman or treating others as things, and ordinary adults also regress toward such forms for relief from the demands of human relations.
- Introduced by
- Harold Searles
- Key works
- 1
introduced by
- Harold Searles 1960 Searles's first book, The Nonhuman Environment (1960), argued that a person's relatedness to animals, landscape and things is a basic and ambivalent part of psychological life, in normal development and in schizophrenia.