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Searles and his colleagues have not only written on “Violence in Schizophrenia,” but have managed to incorporate into the very structure and quality of their presentation some of the essential elements they wish to explain. The paper is filled with a violent honesty, an urgency to make direct contact with the mind and feelings of the reader, and a host of dark fears that need to be shared. From this viewpoint alone it is a remarkable document. It confesses, pleads, speculates, asserts, details, argues, exposes helplessness and insight, and jumps hey-diddle-diddle from the most concrete to the most abstract, from the most objective to the most personal.
Dr. Searles's interviews with patients deserve special mention. He is mainly reality-oriented, blunt, and guided as much
by his inner feelings as by external facts, yet he is sensitive to the nuances of what is expressed and unexpressed by his subjects. He makes no pretence to special power, special understanding, or the Christian virtues of kindness, charity, forgiveness, and love. He is what he is: sometimes fearful, sometimes angry, always curious and open, and responsive both to the surface and to what may lie beneath it. In this psychoanalytic age it is refreshing to encounter an analyst who is not altogether dazzled by his own presumed mastery of primitive unconscious mechanisms.
Obviously no single formulation serves to explain the violence of the schizophrenic patient. The paranoid projections which lead to a sense of persecution and a violent defense against the persecutor represent one type. This is more nearly neurotic in structure, is based on inner unconscious conflict, and is resolved by an act of violence against the alleged persecutor. This paper deals with deeper, more regressive mechanisms, in which the threatened loss of the object, the “gulf of emotional unrelatedness,” leads to violence as an act of reconstitution, reconstruction, restitution. While it may express some striving to be free, it may