Concept
Patient as therapist to the analyst
Harold Searles's thesis, from his 1975 paper 'The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst', that one of the strongest strivings people have toward each other is essentially psychotherapeutic. It begins in the first months of life and is directed first at the parents. On this view a patient becomes ill partly because this striving was thwarted or went unacknowledged. In analysis the patient tries, often unconsciously, to heal the analyst, and the analyst has to recognise and accept these efforts, because the patient's growth depends on their therapeutic capacity being received. Commentators stress that Searles meant a primary wish arising from love, not reparation for harm done.
Development
1975
introduced by Harold Searles
Set out in the 1975 paper 'The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst', reprinted in Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979). It holds that an innate psychotherapeutic striving, first aimed at the parents, is among the strongest human strivings, and that the patient seeks to heal the analyst.
In Countertransference and Related Subjects: Selected Papers (1979)
Relations
- 1975 introduced by Harold Searles
Set out in the 1975 paper 'The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst', reprinted in Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979). It holds that an innate psychotherapeutic striving, first aimed at the parents, is among the strongest human strivings, and that the patient seeks to heal the analyst.
Works
- 1979
Countertransference and Related Subjects: Selected Papers
Countertransference and Related Subjects (New York: International Universities Press, 1979; paperback 1999) is the second collection of Harold F. Searles's papers, following his Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (1965). Its twenty-four chapters, with an introduction, come from his later career. Most concern the intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy of schizophrenic and borderline patients, and the analyst's own emotional participation in that work. Searles treats the analyst's feelings, including guilt, hope, dedication and the urge to heal, as clinical evidence about the patient and the relationship rather than as interference to be eliminated. Several papers trace the phases of treatment from autism and pathological symbiosis, through ambivalent symbiosis, to a therapeutic symbiosis from which individuation can develop. Others take up delusional transference and the patient's realistic perceptions of the analyst; identity formation and dual or multiple identity in borderline functioning; paranoid processes within a hospital treatment team; violence in schizophrenia; and transitional phenomena. The volume also includes the long paper "The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst". Searles argues there that every person has a therapeutic striving toward others, that psychological illness is bound up with the frustration of that striving, and that the analyst must allow the patient to help them. Book reviews, discussions and an essay on unconscious processes in the environmental crisis widen the range. Library Journal praised its plain, jargon-free prose and vivid clinical portraits, and its sense of the humanity patients share with their therapists.
See also
People
References
- Countertransference and Related Subjects: Selected Papers1979Evidence for a relation