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This book is written with an urgency to reach and persuade the reader. Harold Searles writes with honesty about violent and disturbing feelings. For this reason alone, it is a fascinating read.
First published in 1979, Countertransference and Related Papers has just been released in paperback. The twenty-four essays included were written in the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s. Most were written after Searles had left the staff of Chestnut Lodge. While writing, he was a training analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and had an outpatient analytic practice.
Partly for reasons of confidentiality, the clinical examples in the book are almost entirely from his Chestnut Lodge practice. One imagines also that these patients presented such intense experience that they demanded to be written about. The result is a book about analytic practice with violently disturbed and disturbing clinical content. The reader experiences herself as a therapist like the author, feeling tender, or sometimes murderous, toward or invaded by the Chestnut Lodge patients.
Searles starts with a Kleinian model, and discusses Racker's concordant and complementary countertransference. He includes detailed and convincing clinical material demonstrating how a patient induces a response in him, “puts words into his head” (512-13). In applying these ideas to his work with very ill, usually schizophrenic patients, he opens himself to psychotic—often somatically encoded—experience. He has developed his model for the efficacy of psychoanalysis, based on the interchangeability of such experience between analyst and patient. He goes further than most psychoanalysts in allowing himself to be flooded, rather than having only brief glimpses of foreign-feeling experience, and in giving this absolute priority as the agent of cure.
Searles does not emphasize a transitional space—a mode of thought characterized by playfulness, fantasy, “as if-ness,” and dreams. Instead he says, “It seems to me probable tha