My Analysis with Harold Searles

Harold F. Searles, MD, (1918-) pioneered countertransference in treating psychotic and borderline patients. His lively papers set a model for self-honesty, giving generations of mental health practitioners an inside view of intensive analytically-informed treatment of psychosis. Born and raised in Hancock, New York, in the bucolic Catskill Mountains, he received his medical training at Harvard. From 1949 to 1964, he worked at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland during the Dexter Bullard, Sr. and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann era. He was the most prolific of its distinguished staff. He was a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and was President of its Society from 1969 to 1971. He was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown and a Consultant in Psychiatry for NIMH. His popular patient-interview demonstrations remain pivotal events for many psychiatrists. For autobiographical amplification, see Langs and Searles, 1980. (Silver, 2010)

Thomas Ogden's paper “Reading Harold Searles,” begins, “Harold Searles, to my mind, is unrivaled in his ability to capture in words his observations concerning his emotional response to what is occurring in the analytic relationship, and his use of these observations in his effort to understand and interpret the transference-countertransference” (Ogden, 2007, p. 353).

I often wondered how I would react were I to read Searles's process notes of my sessions with him. Searles the analyst, the writer, and the colleague seemed like three different people, the analyst largely withholding the spontaneous aspects of the others.

My chronic analysis with Harold Searles began as a long quest, starting before I was a teenager. My father was in the Albany Psychoanalytic Study Group led by Clinton P. and Alma McCord, MDs. Clinton P. McCord had been analyzed by Freud. McCord wrote an adoring eulogy to Freud, in which Sándor Ferenczi appears as well (McCord, 1940). The study group met at the members' homes on a ro