The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy
Psychoanalyst Harold Searles explored how a largely unconscious, long-term effort within close relationships can quietly erode a person's trust in their own perceptions—and what this reveals about mind, family, and therapy.
When a Relationship Undermines the Mind
Among the many tangled factors that can contribute to serious mental disturbance, the psychoanalyst Harold Searles pointed to one that he believed appears with striking regularity: over long stretches of time, a person may be subjected to a largely unconscious effort—by someone who mattered deeply in their upbringing—to unsettle their grip on reality.
Searles was careful not to reduce a complex problem to a slogan. It would be foolish, he wrote, to claim that a person becomes ill simply because another person "drives them crazy." Such a formula ignores the individual's own inner life, the intricacy of the particular relationship, the dynamics of the whole family, and the larger social forces in which any family is only one small part—often a family overwhelmed by circumstances far beyond its power to control. Still, he argued, this quiet corrosive influence is real, and worth understanding.
What Earlier Researchers Noticed
Searles was not entirely alone. Arieti described what he called "acted-out" psychoses, in which certain people generate situations that provoke breakdown in others while remaining outwardly untouched themselves. A research group led by Johnson reported that, in some families, a parent's hostility expressed through a child could both push the child toward illness and shield the parent from it. Hill and Bowen, working with patients and their families, described a symbiotic bond so tight that a child could come to believe: if I get well, my mother will fall apart.
The Subtle Techniques
Searles insisted these patterns operate mostly beneath awareness—no one plots them coldly. Yet he traced several recurring ways one person can chip away at another's sanity.
Stirring inner conflict. Any interaction that repeatedly sets different parts of a person against each other tends to be destabilising. Searles compares this to the inexperienced or unconsciously cruel therapist who offers premature interpretations, weakening rather than strengthening the patient's defences.
Simultaneous stimulation and frustration. A parent may be seductive toward a child while making it catastrophic to act on the feelings aroused—leaving the child torn between desire and guilt. He recalled a patient who remembered his mother leaning to kiss his father, watching the father's face fill with joyful anticipation, and then straightening up again. The son described it as though he himself had experienced that same withdrawal countless times.
Relating on two unrelated levels at once. Searles gives a vivid personal example: a patient who engaged him in fierce political-philosophical debate while, without a word of acknowledgement, behaving in an overtly seductive way. Because she never confirmed the second, nonverbal channel, his own accurate perception of it began to feel like a "crazy product" of his imagination. This, he suggests, is the crux—when reality is present but never validated, one begins to doubt one's own senses.
Sudden shifts of emotional wavelength. He describes a mother who spoke in an unbroken torrent, her tone lurching so unpredictably that he was momentarily stunned. Another mother could return from worship radiant with bliss and, two minutes later, hurl a dish at a child. One patient needed more than three years of therapy to give up the conviction that he had not one mother but many: "When you use the word 'mother,'" he explained, "I see a parade of women, each representing a different point of view."
The Common Thread: Losing Trust in Oneself
Each of these patterns gradually erodes a person's confidence in their own emotional reactions and their own perception of reality. Johnson's group described children who sensed a parent's anger only to have the parent deny it—and insist the child deny it too. The child then faced an impossible choice: trust their own senses and keep contact with reality, or trust the parent, preserve the vital relationship, and distort their perception. Repeated often enough, such denial can leave a child unable to test reality at all.
Searles noted that these dynamics echo something from an entirely different arena of human life—the techniques of coercion and "brainwashing" studied by Meerloo. What unites them is the assault on a person's confidence in their own mind.
Why It Matters
Searles' point is not to assign blame but to illuminate. Understanding how relationships can quietly undermine our sense of reality helps therapists recognise the same forces at work in the consulting room—including the pressures patient and therapist can exert on each other—and helps all of us appreciate how deeply our inner stability depends on being met, and confirmed, by others.