Harold F. Searles, M.D. (born 1918) [1] is one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specialising in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Harold Searles has the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients;[2] and of being 'not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician'.[3] Searles still holds the Freudian line that homosexuality is an abnormal behavior. He considers transsexuality to be an abnormal behavior.
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Searles was born in upstate New York.[1] He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II.[1] After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas then moved to Washington Metropolitan Area.[1] In 1949 he started work at the luxurious private mental hospital Chestnut Lodge, Maryland where he stayed for the next fifteen years.[1] His colleagues included Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,[1] to whom 'he acknowledged a deep personal debt...[and] whose treatment philosophy he studied at Chestnut Lodge'.[4]
Searles and his wife Sylvia, retired to Davis, California.[1][5] They have two sons and a daughter.[1] Their daughter is actress Sandra Dickinson.[1][6]
'Harold Searles's work has...suffered from an odd kind of isolation in the analytic community, at least until the 1980s...perhaps due to his radical approach to countertransference'.[7] Since then 'Jungian analysts have become increasingly interested in...Searles', with attempts made to 'integrate the work of Jung, Searles, and Langs'.[8] He has also been linked to 'Donald W. Winnicott, and Hans W. Loewald...[as] major psychoanalytic writers [who] have paid more attention to the role of the external environment than has usually been the case'.[9]
Searles has been called 'perhaps the most significant early investigator of the usefulness of countertransference and the use of the self in psychotherapy'.[10] In what was termed 'his audacious paper "Oedipal Love in the Countertransference" ',[11] Searles is said to have 'confessed that he not only fell in love with all his patients in the last stages of their analyses...but thought it a good idea to let them know how he felt'.[12] His thinking would appear to have been that 'The patient's self-esteem benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of arousing such responses in his analyst';[13] and his work might here be seen as a forerunner of the way the later 'intersubjective view...implies a greater involvement of the therapist in terms of spontaneity and countertransference'.[14]
A related line of thought appeared in what has been called 'a very good paper "The Patient as Therapist to his Analyst", [where] Harold Searles (1975) says that in everyone there is a need to heal'.[15] Introducing the concept of the patient's 'unconscious therapeutic initiative'[16] - a precursor of much later thinking on patient/analyst interaction - 'Searles (1975) suggests that human beings have an innate therapeutic impulse towards their fellows, and that psychological illness is related to a disturbance of this therapeutic striving'.[17] Searles's implication is that 'if the analyst is really going to help his patient, he must be able to experience the patient as really...doing something therapeutic for him'.[18]
In his 1978-9 article, "Concerning Transference and Countertransference", Searles continued exploring intersubjectivity, building around the way 'It appears that all patients...have the ability to "read the unconscious" of the therapist'.[19] Searles emphasises that 'we do our patients a disservice if we cannot acknowledge to ourselves the objective grain of truth around which the transference is built'.[20]
' "To the schizophrenic individual"', the psychoanalyst Harold Searles writes in his work Countertransference(1979), as cited by Adam Phillips, '"the question has been not how but whether to relate to his fellow man....in us too this has been, all along, a meaningful and alive and continuing conflict, heretofore hidden from ourselves" '.[21] This may be linked to Searles' 'debt to Martin Buber' in formulating what he described 'as mature relatedness; there is a deep sense of relatedness here but there is no merging, no loss of ego-boundaries'.[22]
'While Harold Searles did say that a good analyst has to endure, to survive the [patient's] attacks, he did also say it was important for the analyst to survive the wish to kill the patient'.[23]
In his 1959 article "The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy", as cited by R. D. Laing, Searles examined six modes of interpersonal communication, of which 'each of these techniques tends to undermine the other person's confidence in his own emotional reactions and his own perception of reality'.[24] One instance he examined was how parental seduction can 'be seen as productive of a conflict in the child between...his desire to mature and fulfil his own individuality, and...his regressive desire to remain in an infantile symbiosis with his parent, to remain there at the cost of investing even his sexual strivings, which constitute his trump card in the game of self-realization, in that regressive relationship'.[25]