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Every new publication of Dr. Searles must arouse the greatest interest in all of us who are deeply involved in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. The particular topic which he and his co-authors discuss in this paper commands, of course, our special attention. One is not disappointed in one's expectations. The paper offers original observations and fascinating examples of Dr. Searles's penetrating interview technique. In his incisive and sometimes strikingly intuitive interpretations, he is able time and again to get to the core of the patient's unconscious conflicts. Sometimes I feel that his interpretations are perhaps too rapid or even shocking—in this respect somewhat reminiscent of John Rosen's “active” analysis. However, in many instances the interpretation strikes one as illuminating. One might argue as to the timing, but then we have to keep in mind that some of the interviews are really first interviews and that they serve a didactic purpose.
As I go over the cases presented, my principal disagreement is with Dr. Searles's by now well-known countertransference interpretations. I must admit that in his former publications I had been struck by his most unusual identification with his psychotic patients. In the present paper he intersperses his excellent interpretations of the patient's dynamics with his
“countertransference” interpretations which, I must confess, seem to me arbitrary and farfetched.
He has, for instance, excellent insight into the dynamics and violent acting out of his first patient, even though I would consider it a rather wild interpretation to say that Mr. Delaney “was faced with the threat of becoming the rapist of the father, as the agent of the mother's phallic strivings.”
But I cannot accept Dr. Searles's interpretations of his own feelings. Instead of simply noticing his obvious and understandable fear of this violent patient, he comments on his own “unconscious passive homosexual longings” which had been aroused by his intervi