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.