The American psychoanalyst, Harold Searles, is something of a free spirit in his field and one of his many contributions to those in the helping professions is his idea that there is a symbiosis or mutual dependency in the relationship between those being looked after and those who do the looking after. Just one of the number of aspects he provides of this phenomenon is how puzzling and threatening it can sometimes be for those of us who as a vocation look after children to find that those we 'look after" are so accurate in their assessments of our insecurities and anxieties. What is more, they frequently take some pleasure in our discomfort and particularly so when we try to hide how irritating we find this to be. In pointing out this phenomenon, Searles seems to imply that our work cannot be defined by simplistic algebraic equations. It is often messy and confused and we must keep our whole reflective selves in play at all times to deal with this and so to help make some sense of it.
To learn more about Harold Searles and many other things read Robert M Young at Human Nature
This opinion piece first appeared on the home page of the goodenoughcaring website where there are many other articles, essays, papers, reviews, poems and essays to be found.
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