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.
Development
1960
Harold Searles introduced by
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.
Relations
- 1960 introduced by Harold Searles
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.
Works
See also
People
References
- The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia1960 Evidence for a relation