Chapter 8 Reading Harold Searles

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. I will offer close readings of portions of two of Searles’s papers, “Oedipal Love in the Countertransference” (1959) and “Unconscious Identification” (1990), in which I describe not only what Searles thinks, but what I believe to be the essence of the way Searles thinks and how he works in the analytic setting. Being receptive to what is occurring at a given moment in an analysis involves, for Searles, an exquisite sensitivity to the unconscious communications of the patient. Such receptivity to the patient’s unconscious communications requires of the analyst a form of laying bare his own unconscious experience. Searles’s way of using himself analytically very often entails a blurring of the distinction between his own conscious and unconscious experience as well as the distinction between his unconscious experience and that of the patient. As a result, Searles’s comments to the patient (and to the reader) concerning what he understands to be occurring between himself and the patient are often startling to the reader, but almost always utilizable by the patient (and the reader) for purposes of conscious and unconscious psychological work.

In discussing “Oedipal Love in the Countertransference,” I will focus on the way in which, for Searles, unflinchingly accurate clinical observation spawns original clinical theory (in this instance, a reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex). When I speak of clinical theory, I am referring to proposed experience-near understandings (formulated in terms of thoughts, feelings, and behavior) of

phenomena occurring in the clinical setting. Transference, for example, is a clinical theory that proposes that certain of the patient’s feelings toward