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Harold Searles has been studying, treating, and writing about schizophrenia and psychotic disorders for the past thirty years. The
treatment of such disorders, it is now widely recognized, requires the study and understanding of the phenomenon of countertransference, and Searles has been a frequent contributor to the psychoanalytic literature on this subject. This book, however, is not, strictly speaking, a major work on the subject of countertransference. It is a collection of Searles' papers on all subjects written since the publication of his previous collection, Schizophrenia and Related Subjects, in 1965. Countertransference is, of course, a subject of continuing interest to the author; some of the chapters here are devoted to it exclusively, and some barely touch on it in passing. Most are concerned with it in some way because of Searles' general focus on treating patients who arouse strong countertransferential feelings.
All the chapters in this volume have appeared previously as journal articles or chapters in anthologies. The value of the book is that it provides the reader with one source within which all of this interesting writer's work of the last fourteen years may be found. The papers are presented in chronological order of first presentation (either as an address or as a written article), so the reader is afforded the opportunity to follow the development of Searles' thought on various analytic subjects over this period of time. In recent years Searles has devoted most of his time to private practice (along with lecturing and teaching) and has, therefore, worked with a wider variety of patients than he saw during his years at Chestnut Lodge. He has discovered, then, that the analysis and use of countertransference is essential when working with patients who “vary widely in the kinds and degrees of emotional illness from which they suffer”—not only the psychoses, but the less severe disorders as well.