ABSTRACT
Harold Searles was not part of the first generation of interpersonal psychoanalysts who studied and taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry and the William Alanson White Institute, but his thinking, his conduct, and his spirit were interpersonal. The current prevailing wisdom places schizophrenia and other varieties of psychosis in the realm of biology and/or neurology, thereby instantiating in the present day Searles' picture of the clinical hierarchy of his own era. From the moment that Sullivan introduced the term "participant-observation", it should have become clear to all who embraced the developing tradition of interpersonal psychoanalysis that the flawed analyst and flawed patient inevitably co-participate with one another, each possessing a wide range of conscious and unconscious affective states. In the tradition of interpersonal psychoanalysis, Searles views all psychological development as a function of internalized experience with key others.
