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Harold Searles

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Harold Frederic Searles[1] (September 1, 1918 – November 18, 2015) was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Harold Searles has the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients;[2] and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the IPA, “not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician”.[3]

Life

Searles was born in 1918[4] at Hancock, New York, a small village in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, which was the subject of many of his reminiscences in his first book, The Nonhuman Environment.[4] He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II, where he served as a captain[4] After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Chestnut Lodge, a private sanitarium in Rockville, MD from 1949–1951, then at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic in Washington, DC from 1951–1952.[5] In 1949 he started work at Chestnut Lodge, where he stayed for the next fifteen years.[4] His colleagues included Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,[4] to whose philosophy of treatment he acknowledged his personal debt.[6]

Searles retired from his private practice in Washington, D.C., in mid-1990's and moved to California in 1997, where both of his sons lived.[4][7] Searles' wife died in 2012, at the age of 93. Thereafter, Searles lived with his youngest son Donald, a Los Angeles-based attorney.[4] Searles' daughter is actress Sandra Dickinson, a London-based actress.[8] His eldest son, David Searle, is a Southern California motorcycle journalist. He died on November 18, 2015 in Los Angeles.[9] Searles is survived by three children, five grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.[4]

Influence

Arguably, Searles' work was largely ignored in the wider analytic community until the 1980s, when his radical views on the analyst's involvement through countertransference started to become more normative.[10] Since then Jungians in particular have paid increasing attention to his work, linking his findings both to those of Jung and to the work of another maverick analyst, Robert Langs.[11]

Searles has also been associated with Donald W. Winnicott and Hans W. Loewald as psychoanalytic figures who all emphasized the importance of the part played in psychic development by the external environment.[12]

On countertransference

Searles has been singled out as one of the pioneer investigators of the potentially useful role of countertransference, and of the therapist's use of his/her own self in treatment.[13]

In his 1959 article 'Oedipal Love in the Countertransference', Searles wrote that he not only fell in Pygmalionesque love with his patients as they recovered, but also told them how he felt[14] Searles argued that “the patient's self-esteem benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of arousing such responses in his analyst”[15] - a view which can be seen as a forerunner of intersubjective psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference.[16]

In his later paper of 1975, 'The Patient as Therapist to his Analyst', Searles argues that everybody has an urge to heal – something only distinguished in the psychotherapist in being tapped into formally.[17] Using the concept of what he called the patient's “unconscious therapeutic initiative”[18] - a precursor of much later thinking on patient/analyst interaction - Searles suggested that psychological illness is related to a disturbance of this natural tendency to heal others; with the surprising corollary that to help a patient the analyst/therapist must really experience the patient as doing something therapeutic for them.[19]

In his 1978-9 article, "Concerning Transference and Countertransference", Searles continued exploring intersubjectivity, building on his belief that “all patients...have the ability to 'read the unconscious' of the therapist”.[20] Searles emphasized the importance of the therapist's acknowledging the core of truth around which a patient's transference materializes.[21]

On relatedness

Searles saw the schizophrenic individual as struggling with the question, not so much of how to relate, but of whether to relate to others. Searles, however, considered this merely as an exacerbated version of the same (if hidden) conflict that affects us all.[22]

Searles' interpersonal ideal - in the formulation of which he was indebted to Martin Buber - was of what he called a mature relatedness, something which involves connection without merging, or the loss of personal boundaries.[23]

On "The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy"

In an article of 1959, 'The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy', Searles examined six modes of interpersonal communication, arguing that “each of these techniques tends to undermine the other person's confidence in his own emotional reactions and his own perception of reality”.[24] Among these techniques were switching emotional wavelengths while discussing the same topic; and dealing with different topics (life and death/trivial) while remaining on the same wavelength.

Such attempts at crazy-making were often applied by patients to therapists, who had the task of enduring them without retaliation. Searles added moreover that it was important for the therapist to survive their own wish to kill the patient.[25]

Like many articles in psychoanalysis from the early and middle part of the 20th century Searles' work reflects an older version of views on homosexuality and transsexuality that are no longer part of the current mainstream of psychoanalytic thought. Whatever outdated views he may have expressed, like many of the revolutionary analytic writers, do not detract from the essential contributions he made to a revised understanding of the psychoanalytic treatment relationship and its complex processes.[26]

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ http://www.pep-web.org/document.php
  3. ^ R. Horacio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique(London 2005) p. 173
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Robert M Young. 'Harold Searles', The Human Nature Review (2005). Retrieved 07 July 2010.
  5. ^ APA Biographical Dictionary, 1977
  6. ^ Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Eric Fromm (Harvard 1991) p. 173
  7. ^ http://www.isps.org/modules/module_123/templates/publisher_template_detail_1.asp
  8. ^ Swann, Yvonne (4 September 2009). "Daily Mail". Sandra Dickinson was bullied for her fair hair at school but her life turned around when she discovered mascara. London. Retrieved 5 September 2009.
  9. ^ "A Tribute to Harold F. Searles, MD". International Psychoanalysis. Retrieved 1 December 2015.
  10. ^ David Sedgwick, Jung and Searles (1993) p. 7
  11. ^ Sedgwick, p. 1
  12. ^ Carolyn Saari, The Environment (Columbia 2002) p. 7
  13. ^ Lewis Aron, in Karen J. Mahoda, The Power of Countertransference (2004) p. x
  14. ^ Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: the impossible profession (London 1988) p. 168n
  15. ^ Searles, quoted in Malcolm, p. 168n
  16. ^ Jan Grant and Jim Crawley, Transference and Projection (Buckingham 2002), p. 57
  17. ^ Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 2003), p. 36
  18. ^ Searles, quoted in Patrick Casement, On Learning from the Patient (London 1999) p. 180
  19. ^ Michael Parsons, 'The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes' (London 2000) p. 42
  20. ^ Searles, quoted in R. M Young, Benign and virulent projective identification
  21. ^ Josephine Klein, Jacob's Ladder (London 2003) p. 193
  22. ^ Adam Phillips, Going Sane (London 2005), p. 172
  23. ^ Klein, p. 191 and p. 194
  24. ^ Searles quoted in R. D. Laing, Self and Others(Middlesex 1972), p. 139
  25. ^ Scharff, in Martin S. Bergmann, Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis (2004) p. 319
  26. ^ (Slavin, J. (2007). The imprisonment and liberation of love: The dangers and possibilities of love in the psychoanalytic relationship. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 27:197-218.)

Further reading

  • Searles, Harold F.. Countertransference and related subjects; selected papers., Publisher New York, International Universities Press, 1979, ISBN 0-8236-1085-3
  • Searles, Harold F.: Collected papers on schizophrenia and related subjects, Imprint New York, International Universities Press, 1965, ISBN 0-8236-0980-4
  • Searles, Harold F: My Work With Borderline Patients, Publisher: Jason Aronson, 1994, ISBN 1-56821-401-4
  • Searles, Harold F.: The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia (New York, 1960)
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