Searles had the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients;[2] and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician".
[3] Searles was born in 1918[4] at Hancock, New York, a small village in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, which was the subject of many of his reminiscences in his first book, The Nonhuman Environment.
[10] Searles argued that "the patient's self-esteem benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of arousing such responses in his analyst"[11]—a view which can be seen as a forerunner of intersubjective psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference.
[18] Searles' interpersonal ideal – in the formulation of which he was indebted to Martin Buber – was of what he called a mature relatedness, something which involves connection without merging, or the loss of personal boundaries.
Arguably, Searles' work was largely ignored in the wider analytic community until the 1980s, when his radical views on the analyst's involvement through countertransference started to become more normative.
[24] Searles has also been associated with Donald W. Winnicott and Hans W. Loewald as psychoanalytic figures who all emphasized the importance of the part played in psychic development by the external environment.