15 Facts About Harold Searles

Harold Frederic Searles was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia.

Harold 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.

Harold Searles 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, Maryland, from 1949 to 1951, then at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic in Washington, DC, from 1951 to 1952.

Harold Searles's colleagues included Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, to whose philosophy of treatment he acknowledged his personal debt.

Harold Searles retired from his private practice in Washington, DC, in the mid-1990s and moved to California in 1997, where both of his sons lived.

Thereafter, Harold Searles lived with his younger son, Donald, until Harold Searles' death three years later, on November 18,2015, aged 97, in Los Angeles.

Harold Searles's younger son, Donald, is a Los Angeles-based attorney.

Harold Searles's elder son, David Searle, is a Southern California motorcycle journalist.

Harold Searles was survived by three children, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Harold Searles has been singled out as one of the pioneer investigators of the potentially useful role of countertransference, and of the therapist's use of his or her own self in treatment.

Harold Searles emphasized the importance of the therapist's acknowledging the core of truth around which a patient's transference materializes.

Harold Searles saw the schizophrenic individual as struggling with the question, not so much of how to relate, but of whether to relate to others.

Harold Searles considered this merely as an exacerbated version of the same conflict that affects us all.

Harold Searles added moreover that it was important for the therapist to survive their own wish to kill the patient.

Arguably, Harold 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.