On "The Effort To Drive The Other Person Crazy"
In an article of 1959, 'The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy', Searles examined six modes of interpersonal communication, arguing that “each of these techniques tends to undermine the other person's confidence in his own emotional reactions and his own perception of reality”. Among these techniques were switching emotional wavelengths while discussing the same topic; and dealing with different topics (life and death/trivial) while remaining on the same wavelength.
Such attempts at crazy-making were often applied by patients to therapists, who had the task of enduring them without retaliation. Searles added moreover that it was important for the therapist to survive their own wish to kill the patient.
Read more about this topic: Harold Searles
Famous quotes containing the words effort, drive, person and/or crazy:
“But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man’s bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)