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This issue revisits the Chestnut Lodge of 1961, by publishing one of its weekly case conferences. Chestnut Lodge (1910–2001) was a small, private psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, owned by three generations of the Bullard family until 1997. One of its most renowned staff members, Harold F. Searles (1918–2015), presented his work with a patient we will call “Joan Douglas,” using Searles’ disguised name for a woman he wrote about often in subsequent years. Searles followed Frieda Fromm-Reichmann as one of the Lodge’s best-known psychiatrists. Searles became internationally known for his expertise in treating and writing about schizophrenia and borderline personality. His experience-near, intensely clinical writings have grown in their appeal in subsequent years, being highly valued by analysts and therapists of many theoretical persuasions. Given the “tribal” divergences among the various psychoanalytic schools and theories, Searles is unusual in this regard. He once wrote that his own analyst, Ernest Hadley, “was a classical psychoanalyst and that’s been a very important part of a great deal of professional identity-turmoil [for] me” (Langs & Searles, 1980, p. 32). Searles said that his years at the Lodge added an interpersonal influence to his identity. Excessive loyalty to a single analytic theory can lessen creativity and originality, as one worries how colleagues will react to one’s contributions.
Searles greatly expanded our awareness of the pathogenic role of unconscious processes as they affect the patient, and as they unfold in the interactions of patient and analyst. He was enormously controversial early on, when the prevalent attitude toward countertransference was that it exposed the analyst as insufficiently analyzed. As a result, analysts narrowed their awareness of countertransference reactions, to lessen their sense of shame. It is thanks to Searles and other influential figures that we now take it for granted that countertransference is inev