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Why Do People Induce Inner Conflict in Others?
Part 2 in a review of psychoanalytic work on how we do what we do to each other.
In Part 1 of this two-part post, we looked at how psychoanalyst Harold Searles thought about how we drive each other crazy. On one hand, he describes many pathological reasons for doing so, in his focus on maladaptive parental and family dynamics. He notes there are other reasons people have difficulty maintaining a grip on reality and our own emotional states than how we are raised, but his focus is on developmental factors and how they play out in adulthood, and particularly in therapy.
In this follow-up piece, we review the reasons why — the motivations for — driving the other person crazy. They range from self-preservation to a need to escape from distress, to desires to become more healthy, to the pursuit of intense symbiotic gratification.
Motivations behind inducing inner conflict in others
An effort to get rid of the other person. Searles writes, “The effort to drive the other person crazy can consist, predominantly, in the psychological equivalent of murder; that is, it can represent primarily an endeavor to destroy him, to get rid of him as completely as if he were physically destroyed.” This may be the result of…
