Searles, Harold - The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy

Chapter 8

THE EFFORT TO DRIVE THE OTHER PERSON CRAZY -AN ELEMENT IN THE AETIOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA ( 1959) 1 A MoNo all the factors in the aetiology of schizophrenia, l"'l.factors which are undoubtedly complex and, further, considerably variable from one case to another, there appears to be one specific ingredient which can often -and even, I believe, regularly- be found to be operative. My clinical experience has indicated that the individual becomes schizophrenic partly by reason of a long-continued effort, a largely or wholly unconscious effort, on the part of some person or persons highly important in his upbringing, to drive him crazy. I well know that it would be inane to reduce the complex aetiology of schizophrenia to a simple formula stating that an individual becomes schizophrenic because some other individual drives him crazy. Such a formula would not do justice to the individual's own psychological activity in the situation, to the complexity of that particular interpersonal relationship, to the complex group-processes of the family situation, or to the larger socio-dynamic processes in which the family plays but a partoften a part in which the family as a whole is helpless to deal with large and tragic circumstances quite beyond any family's capacity to control or avert.

Previous Literature The only writings about this subject which I have found in the professional literature are statements by Arieti (1955), and by that group of researchers at the Mayo Foundation which is headed by Johnson (Beckett et al., 1956; and Johnson, Giffin, Watson & Beckett, 1956), and these statements have done little more than touch upon the subject, without exploring it in detail. 1

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