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This book has an ambitious goal. Carl Jung and Harold Searles are two contributors to the general field of psychology that I would not, at first blush, have considered as having, in any way, compatible theories. Searles, known to me in his personal presentations
as well as in his writings, seems a very “down-to-earth” proponent of the neverlands of nonhuman environment and is renowned for his patience, courage, and empathic understanding of deeply disturbed patients. Carl Jung's work is usually little known to psychoanalysts. The reasons for this may make an interesting study in itself since Jung, whose legendary disagreements with Freud he later felt were somewhat healed, nonetheless led to the development of the separate field of analytic psychology characterizing the work of Jungian analytical psychologists. Adding to the split are the mystical archetypal theories of Jung, which are central in his description of the human condition. These have become a convenient springboard for some of the more superficial psychological ideas that grew out of the human potential movement, although more recently transpersonal psychology has integrated Jungian ideas with other schools of thought in a sophisticated and scholarly fashion. Nonetheless the taint of superficiality remains, stereotyping Jungian ideas as lightweight and trendy. Sedgwick is to be thanked for his attempt to bring a scholarly and integrated emphasis to the widely disparate fields of analytic psychology and psychoanalysis.
This book was initially a Ph.D. dissertation, later revised after years of clinical experience. The author clearly states that he has as a goal not only to compare the works of Jung and Searles, but to attempt to synthesize and produce a third, new theory of his own from this work. According to Sedgwick, Harold Searles did not like this attempt at integration.
Sedgwick sees himself as a member of an expanding group of English Jungian analysts who have attempted to assimilate object relatio