Person
Harold Searles
American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent fifteen years at Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital in Maryland, treating schizophrenic patients with intensive psychotherapy. His papers, gathered in Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (1965) and Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979), are known for their candid use of the analyst's own feelings, including love, hatred and confusion, as information about the patient. He also wrote on the human relation to the nonhuman environment and on borderline patients.
Ideas
- 1959 introduced Effort to drive the other person crazy
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.
- 1959 reworked Oedipus complex
In 'Oedipal Love in the Countertransference' (1959), Searles described his own romantic and erotic feelings toward recovering patients and held that such responses, felt and contained by the analyst, help the analysis of the Oedipus complex succeed. Ogden reads this as a reconception of what that analysis requires.
- 1960 introduced Nonhuman environment
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.
- 1975 introduced Patient as therapist to the analyst
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.
- introduced Therapeutic symbiosis
Searles described therapeutic symbiosis as a phase of mutual, deeply regressed dependency between patient and therapist. It comes after the patient's early pathological symbiosis and an out-of-contact phase, and before individuation. He placed it at the heart of the deepest therapeutic work.
- developed Countertransference
Searles treated the analyst's own feelings, including love, hate and confusion, as central information about the patient and about the relationship. His selected papers on the subject appeared as Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979).
Influence
Affinity
- influenced Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden counts Searles's frank use of his own feelings with very disturbed patients among the analytic works he read closely and drew on.
- influenced by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
Searles joined Chestnut Lodge in 1949, where Fromm-Reichmann was then practising intensive psychotherapy with psychotic patients. His understanding of psychosis was shaped by her there.
- influenced by Donald Winnicott
Searles cited Winnicott often, among the British analysts he felt close to, and returned repeatedly to Winnicott's transitional phenomena. Young also reports that Winnicott admired Searles, wrote to him and invited him to England. The influence is affinity and citation; no direct training link is attested.
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.
- 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.
References
- Reading Harold Searles2007Evidence for a relation
- Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting2009Evidence for a relation
- The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia1960Evidence for a relation
- Countertransference and Related Subjects: Selected Papers1979Evidence for a relation
- 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
- Oedipal Love in the Countertransference1959Evidence for a relation