Karen Horney’s Search for Self-Understanding

Bernard Paris’ biography Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), deals with a powerful thinker and practitioner whose influence is far greater than her reputation. Born Karen Danielson, Horney (1885­1952) entered analysis with Karl Abraham in 1910, became a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association in 1920, and in the 1920s published a number of essays that developed away from orthodox Freudian theory, especially as regards feminine psychology and the concept of “penis envy.” She emigrated to the United States in 1932, became associate director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933 (at the invitation of Franz Alexander), and relocated in 1934 to become a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. As her disagreements with Freudian theory widened, antagonism towards her grew within the movement, and in 1941 she broke away completely to found the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She developed her ideas in a series of studies published in the 1930s and 40s that culminated in Neurosis and Human Growth (1950).

A Professor of English at the University of Florida, Paris has in a series of books championed Horney’s theories as a powerful tool for the analysis of literature, culture and biography. Robert C. Tucker’s Stalin in Power, 1928­1941 exemplifies the method he uses. Here, Paris draws upon previous biographies, fresh documents, and conceptual breakthroughs to present the fullest picture we are likely to get for a long while of Horney’s life and thought. In addition to providing a clear exposition of her ideas, he also subjects Horney to a Horneyian analysis, finding a wealth of autobiographical detail in her writings about her fictitious patient Clare. The results are fascinating, if not always pretty.

For Horney, neurotic individuals adopt interpersonal strategies of defense early on to deal with psychologically unfavorable conditions: they become expansive, dependent, or aloof (depending compulsively on aggression, love or independence as solutions to their problems). Internally, they waste psychic energies in the development of idealized selves” to shield against feelings of inadequacy. Horney stresses being responsive to experience rather than sticking to one defensive solution or another, urges the nourishment of the “real” self that represents authentic growth, and proposes an optimistic view of human nature as governed by a yearning for self-fulfillment.

Paris’ research shows that Horney’s insights were born of a process of intense personal struggle. While on the one hand displaying admirable courage in developing her theories in an often hostile environment, she

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herself could become autocratic and capricious in authority. She had disastrous relations with men in part because of self-contradictory urges: she wanted them simultaneously to be supportive (dependent) and commanding (crudely forceful). Seeking to satisfy unstable demands, she entered many destructive relationships, sometimes with younger colleagues like Erich Fromm (with whom she eventually quarreled) and sometimes, to her discredit, with candidates at her Institute, whose emotional lives she frequently devastated. While presenting this dubious personal legacy in unblinking detail, however, Paris makes the case for Horney as an individual of powerful ideas and insights who used her struggle to gain deeper insights into herself and her patients. The power of her ideas entitles her to a greater cultural presence than she has, and Paris’ book may help her gain it.

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