Mary Nina Searl (13 October 1883[1] – 26 February 1955)[2] was an English psychologist and one of the earliest British child psychoanalysts, who came by way of the Brunswick Square Clinic to become a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.[3] She was analysed by Hanns Sachs.[4]
Among her supervisees was John Bowlby while she also helped train D. W. Winnicott and Susan Isaacs.
Searl was born in Forest Gate, Chippenham, Wiltshire.[5] She was educated at Sidcup High School before entering the University of London in 1901.[6]
During the twenties and thirties, Searl published a number of theoretical contributions, on subjects ranging from childhood stammering to depersonalization.[7] She explored childhood phantasies of bodily destruction,[8] as well as the repeated flight to reality where the individual seeks reassurance again and again that underlying fears are indeed imaginary, without ever reaching full reassurance.[9]
Perhaps her most significant contribution was however her article on technique of 1936, which has been described as a neglected classic, anticipating much later work on ego resistance in analysis.[10] While previously Searl had been closely associated with the movement around Melanie Klein, the article aroused considerable hostility from Kleinians, in a way anticipating the later Controversial discussions[11] - hostility which ultimately resulted in Searl leaving the psychoanalytic movement.[12]
Searl's downplaying of the role of theory in the article - "The function of theory is to help the analyst's weakness on extra-analytical occasion and is of use to the patient only in this indirect fashion"[13] - may have contributed to this hostility; though again it can be seen as anticipating later positions such as those held by Joseph J. Sandler.