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23 February, 1960
DEAR SIR,
Even though more than a year has elapsed since the publication of 'Positive Feelings in the Relationship Between the Schizophrenic and His Mother', by Harold F. Searles (3), we believe we must challenge and correct a statement and an attitude that he attributed to us. The statement is not simply erroneous but expresses almost the opposite of what we had intended and which, upon rereading, we believe we expressed. Indeed, we consider that certain opinions expressed by Dr Searles are elaborations of the thesis of our essay rather than a refutation of it. However, the therapeutic implications of the concept that he promulgates and illustrates are antipodal to ours.
He writes, 'Ruth W. Lidz and Theodore Lidz … describe the child as being basically motivated by a (selfish) concern for his own security in the face of a mother who battens parasitically upon him and is striving primarily to express her malevolence towards him.' The closest approximation to such sentiments that we can find in our paper (2) reads, 'Perhaps the crux of the problem lies here, that the schizophrenic patient's primary concern is not with the development and defense of his own personality and needs, but primarily with those of his mother, for without her he cannot exist. The efforts to maintain her as a benevolent figure when she is basically malevolent towards the patient as a separate (italics in the original) individual may require profound distortions of reality.'
We do not believe that we ascribe basically selfish motivations to the patient, or malevolent intentions to the mother. We wrote, 'The child is burdened with the need to complete the mother's life, a task that cannot be accomplished: empathetically sensing that he must, if he wishes to have a safe maternal figure for security; … still the parental figure is needed and the child learns, or rather trains himself to uncanny sensitivity towards the feelings and needs of another, so apparent in schizophrenic