Reading Harold Searles

Through a close reading of two of Harold Searles's papers, Ogden considers what Searles thinks, how he thinks and how he works with patients. He finds in Searles an emotional responsiveness to the transference-countertransference in which conscious and unconscious receptivity and thought are continuous, and frankly honest clinical descriptions from which new theory seems almost to arise by itself, as in Searles's rethinking of what a successful analysis of the Oedipus complex involves. Ogden calls Searles's characteristic way of thinking and interpreting 'turning experience inside out': transforming the unseen and unnamed emotional context of experience into verbal content that can be thought and spoken. In a final section he identifies an unexpected complementarity between Searles and Bion: Searles gives clinical form and life to Bion's often abstract ideas, among them container-contained, the human need for truth and the relation of conscious to unconscious, while Bion offers a broader theoretical frame for Searles's clinical work.