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Biomedical subjects

H F Searles

Publications and source records attributed to H F Searles.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1985

Separation and loss in psychoanalytic therapy with borderline patients: further remarks.

This paper is a continuation of an earlier one concerning borderline patients, and I can recapitulate only a few of the many areas touched upon here. The borderline individual is faced continually with the threat of loss, either of his tenuously established individual identity, through fusion with the other person, or of his fragile interpersonal relatedness, through uncontrollable flight into autism of psychotic degree. A basic theme in one's work with these persons is that of unconscious, fantasied omnipotence, variously an aspect of the patient's unconscious self-image or projected into the therapist. The acting-out which the patient does consists in his inflicting loss, deprivation, and other forms of injury upon his introjects of part-aspects of the therapist. The grief involved in the relinquishment of so-called bad introjects is discussed. The patient early in therapy is aware of his inability to grieve, and endeavors to conceal this deficiency by spurious emotionality. I give examples of patients' manifesting regressive dedifferentiation to fusion with elements of the nonhuman environment, as an unconscious defense against feelings of separation and loss. Effective therapy with these patients involves the therapist's deeper working through of his own losses. The significant losses occurred so early in these patients' lives that the therapeutic exploration of these areas may enable the therapist to gain access to comparably early losses on his own part, losses from a developmental era which many a training analysis may not have explored at all adequately.

Anxiety, Separation↗
PubMed1976

Transitional phenomena and therapeutic symbiosis.

This paper suggests that the analyst (or therapist) can best understand transitional-object phenomena as being tributary to, or consisting in various different facets of, the--for him in his work with patients--more comprehensive realm of therapeutic symobiosis. The author highlights data concerning objects or phenomena which are transitional for both patient and analyst concomitantly. He suggests that the patient's symptoms have become, early in the phase of therapeutic symbiosis, transitional objects for both patient and analyst simultaneously. As with the patient's symptoms, so with his transference images of the analyst: it is suggested that, in order for any effective transference analysis to occur with any patient, whether neurotic, borderline, or psychotic, the analyst must have come to accept at least a transitional-object degree--if not more deeply symbiotic degree--of relatedness with the particular transference image which is holding sway presently in the analysis.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Concerning transference and countertransference.

This paper is presented primarily for its historical interest. The author's first attempted publication in psychiatry or psychoanalysis, it was submitted successively to two publications in 1949, rejected by each, and filed away until now. In it, the author suggests that transference phenomena constitute projections, and that all projective manifestations-including transference reactions-have some real basis in the analyst's behavior and represent, therefore, distortions in degree only. The latter of these two suggestions implies a degree of emotional participation by the analyst which is not adequately described by the classical view of him as manifesting sympathetic interest, and nothing else, toward the patient. It has been the writer's experience that the analyst actually does feel, and manifest in various ways, a great variety of emotions during the analytic hour. The analytic usefulness of this actual richness of emotional participation, by the analyst, is detailed.

Adult↗