Article
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.
Main ideas
- A close reading of two of Searles's papers examines what he thinks, how he thinks and how he works with patients.
- Searles responds emotionally to the transference-countertransference with a seamless continuity of conscious and unconscious receptivity and thought.
- His unflinchingly honest clinical descriptions seem to generate original theory, such as a rethinking of what successful analysis of the Oedipus complex involves.
- 'Turning experience inside out': converting the invisible, unnameable emotional context of experience into thinkable, speakable verbal content.
- Searles and Bion complement each other: Searles gives clinical shape to Bion's abstract ideas, and Bion gives Searles a wider theoretical frame.
What it shows
Harold Searles 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.
Harold Searles 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).
- 1959
Harold Searles 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.