Reading Harold Searles

Giving Back What the Patient Brings: On Winnicott's "Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development"

The author offers a creative reading of Winnicott's (1967) "Mirror-role of mother and family in child development." Winnicott presents the idea that a pivotal experience in the process of the infant's coming into being as himself is the mother's communicating to the infant, by the look in her eyes, what she sees there when she looks at him. In the absence of the experience of being seen, the infant's capacity to feel real and alive atrophies. The author fleshes out Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that just as the infant comes more fully into being as he sees himself in his mother's eyes, so too, the mother comes more fully into being as a mother as she sees herself in the infant's eyes. The paradigm shift that Winnicott has contributed to psychoanalysis is reflected in the clinical work he presents: (1) the goal of psychoanalysis is no longer the enrichment of the patient's self-understanding; rather, the analytic goal is the patient's coming more fully alive to himself; and (2) the analyst helps the patient achieve this end not by making astute interpretations but by allowing the patient to experience the pleasure of making discoveries of his or her own.

Like the belly of a bird breathing: On Winnicott's "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-soma"

In "Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma," Winnicott reinvents the concept of psyche-soma by viewing it as a set of experiences located neither in the body nor in the brain, and in fact, not located anywhere. Psyche, in health, is understood to be the imaginative functioning of mental processes, and soma is understood to be the experience of physical realness and aliveness. Winnicott offers a clinical illustration of work with a patient who feels unreal to herself. He describes a juncture in the analysis in which the patient's somatic functioning is everything, while Winnicott, by feeling his own breathing and watching the patient breathe, knows that she is alive. This is the beginning of her becoming able to experience her breathing (soma) and imagining (psyche) as real, alive, and her own.Among the concepts Winnicott alludes to, and that I develop, are (1) the idea that in his clinical work Winnicott not only lives an experience with the patient, he also brings an unspoken structure of meaning to the experience, and the two are inseparable; and (2) the idea that Winnicott introduces a set of terms and a way of thinking that is independent of the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind (Freud's topographic model). These ideas include aliveness and deadness, realness and unrealness, being and disruption of being.

What alive means: On Winnicott's "transitional objects and transitional phenomena"

In his reading of Winnicott's "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena," the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of "the negative," a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.

HAROLD SEARLES: LIFELONG WORK OF A MASTER CLINICIAN

Harold F. Searles was one of the most gifted and innovative clinicians of psychoanalysis. His clinical work arouses interest on its own merit, as well as for the ways in which it shaped his highly innovative thinking. We can only imagine what special processes were developing in Searles's inner world under the everlasting impact of his experience with psychotic patients and from his life in general. Searles focused extensively on how the psychotic individuals' mental distortions impacted their capacity to form personal relationships in general, and the role of the analyst and countertransference in treatment. This unique viewpoint helped him sustain a creative commitment to psychotic patients, regarded by many as unsuitable for psychoanalysis.

Elements of analytic style: Bion's clinical seminars

The author finds that the idea of analytic style better describes significant aspects of the way he practices psychoanalysis than does the notion of analytic technique. The latter is comprised to a large extent of principles of practice developed by previous generations of analysts. By contrast, the concept of analytic style, though it presupposes the analyst's thorough knowledge of analytic theory and technique, emphasizes (1) the analyst's use of his unique personality as reflected in his individual ways of thinking, listening, and speaking, his own particular use of metaphor, humor, irony, and so on; (2) the analyst's drawing on his personal experience, for example, as an analyst, an analysand, a parent, a child, a spouse, a teacher, and a student; (3) the analyst's capacity to think in a way that draws on, but is independent of, the ideas of his colleagues, his teachers, his analyst, and his analytic ancestors; and (4) the responsibility of the analyst to invent psychoanalysis freshly for each patient. Close readings of three of Bion's 'Clinical seminars' are presented in order to articulate some of the elements of Bion's analytic style. Bion's style is not presented as a model for others to emulate or, worse yet, imitate; rather, it is described in an effort to help the reader consider from a different vantage point (provided by the concept of analytic style) the way in which he, the reader, practices psychoanalysis.

A reconsideration of Freud's essays on sexuality and their clinical implications

This paper considers some of the concisely presented material of the second of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a), on "Infantile Sexuality." The author puts forward the view that infantile sexuality may be thought of not simply as an immature stage that must be passed through, but also as a pool of psychic experiences upon which mature personality organization can continually draw, in dynamic oscillation among different mental positions. The link between infantile sexuality and the structuring of the psychic apparatus, discussed in the first and third of the Three Essays ("The Sexual Aberrations" and "The Transformations of Puberty"), raises questions that are still open to further research.

Kafka, Borges, and the creation of consciousness, Part I: Kafka--dark ironies of the "gift" of consciousness

The ways in which Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part I, the author juxtaposes a biographical sketch of Kafka with a close reading of his story "A Hunger Artist" (1924), in which a character (whose personality holds much in common with that of Kafka) spends his life in a quasi-delusional state starving himself in public performances. The hunger artist's self-awareness (of having lived a life devoid of the experience of love and mutual recognition) is achieved in the context of an interpersonal experience in which he has, in fact, found/created "the food [he] liked," that is, an experience of loving and being loved, of seeing and being seen, of being aware of and alive to his own imminent death. This fragile, paradoxical state of consciousness is sustained for only a moment before it is attacked, but not entirely destroyed.