Harold Searles

Harold Frederic Searles (September 1, 1918 – November 18, 2015) was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Harold Searles has the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the IPA, “not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician”.

Searles was born in 1918 at Hancock, New York, a small village in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, which was the subject of many of his reminiscences in his first book, The Nonhuman Environment. He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II, where he served as a captain After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Chestnut Lodge, a private sanitarium in Rockville, MD from 1949–1951, then at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic in Washington, DC from 1951–1952. In 1949 he started work at Chestnut Lodge, where he stayed for the next fifteen years. His colleagues included Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, to whose philosophy of treatment he acknowledged his personal debt.

Searles retired from his private practice in Washington, D.C., in mid-1990's and moved to California in 1997, where both of his sons lived. Searles' wife died in 2012, at the age of 93. Thereafter, Searles lived with his youngest son Donald, a Los Angeles-based attorney. Searles' daughter is actress Sandra Dickinson, a London-based actress. His eldest son, David Searle, is a Southern California motorcycle journalist. He died on November 18, 2015 in Los Angeles. Searles is survived by three children, five grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

Arguably, Searles' work was largely ignored in the wider analytic community until the 1980s, when his radical views on the analyst's involvement through countertransference started to become more normative. Since then Jungians in particular have paid increasing attention to his work, linking his findings both to those of Jung and to the work of another maverick analyst, Robert Langs.

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