On: Reading Harold Searles

Dear Editors,

“To put it simply,” writes Brodsky, “one is changed by what one loves, sometimes to the point of losing one's entire identity” (Brodsky, 1986, p. 365). Thomas Ogden's moving commentary on Searles (Ogden, 2007) is an exploration of this statement, an exploration that is derived partly from Searles's papers and into which Ogden blends his own colors of understanding (Ogden, 1994). Searles is only too aware of the influx of influences of self on other and of other on self that take place within a therapeutic hour, and that are perhaps a part of all human relations, and in his writings he attempts to transform this, to him, painful realization into imaginative gain, i.e. into the area of the influence of self on self (Bloom, 1997; Shoham, 2008a). In many ways Bion's theoretical leap (Bion, 1962), postulating projective identification as a form of communication, does much to do away with the undercurrents of anxiety and guilt embedded in the struggle of influences (Shoham, 2008b), although in his writings Bion too often laments the heavy emotional price an analyst must pay daily. It seems that Ogden's paper offers yet another affirmation that influences, i.e. ‘unconscious identifications’, are never to be avoided in human relations, and what he seems to suggest is that the more comfortable we grow with this realization, the larger an area of comfort we gain internally, for what one arrives at is a simple understanding that does not aim to look ‘behind’ but rather appreciates experience as such. Thus viewed, attempts to transform experience into meaning are sometimes not only a need and a gain, but also an indication of a deeper discomfort that, once overcome, opens the way to a truly simple registration of emotional facts: “Searles knows in a way that few analyst have known that there is only one consciousness and that the unconscious aspect of consciousness is in the conscious aspect, not under or behind it” (Ogden, 2007, p. 364). One can struggle with infl