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Our Inner Conflicts, Dr. Horney's fourth book, contains a unified culmination of all of her previous work. It represents a comprehensive theory of neurosis. In her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, she emphasized the significance of cultural factors as they adversely affect personality growth and presented the outlines for a general theory of neurosis. In her second book, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, she elucidated her theoretical differences with Freud. Self Analysis, her third book, clarified in a more integrated manner the importance of neurotic trends for an understanding of the neurotic character structure and indicated the possibilities and limitations of analytic self-help.
Dr. Horney's work represents a development of some of Freud's pioneer ideas and a divergence from others. The subtitle of her new book, “A Constructive Theory of Neurosis,” indicates the philosophical premises of her theory and their contrast with Freud's. Freud believed that man was driven by irrational instincts which had to be held in check or sublimated. He believed that man by nature was destructive and that his constructive efforts were sublimations of his instincts brought about by social pressure. Freud's philosophy was a pessimistic one; his psychology, genetic and mechanistic in its orientation. He developed his theory of neurosis from the narrow basis of psychosexuality, i.e., from his conclusions regarding the vicissitudes of the libidinal instincts.
Dr. Horney's philosophy is an optimistic one. Her thinking is dialectic and evolutionary. Her belief is that man is by nature constructive and that he becomes destructive secondarily, when impediments are put in the way of his natural growth and development. Her theory is based on the broad concept of the total personality. She thinks of neurosis as the result of disturbed human relationships, and that neurosis in its turn exaggerates these very disturbances.
For Freud, personality problems were an expression of disturb