Psychoanalysis and the News World

Psychoanalysis is beginning to seep into the News World through various channels—due to a considerable degree to the pioneer work of Dr. Horney and her associates in extending the field of discussion of analysis from the personal to the political and sociological fields, from the case history of the individual to the case history of the society which produced that individual. Dr. Horney's first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, indicated some of the intricacies of the relationship between people and the period in which they live.

Many of the disturbances described in Dr. Horney's recent book, Our Inner Conflicts, the anxieties and aggressions, the fears and frustrations, the repressions, compulsions and exploitations, are as applicable to societies as to individuals—are found in the councils of the United Nations as well as in the kitchens of John and Mary Does.

Societies, like persons, desire to survive, beget, expand; they desire security and they desire power. When these desires are thwarted or misdirected, the results may be repressions, explosions, and war.

In the psychopathology of history, and the daily news that eventually becomes history, one encounters neuroses among nations, compulsions in empires, complexes in commonwealths, and many varieties of schizophrenia in united states, nations, or soviets.

Psychoanalysis showed its earliest influence in the field of medicine and later in art and literature. But precisely where in the news world does one find its influence or coloration?

In the economic fields of business, finance, and industry, as reported in the newspapers, psychoanalysis appears to be conspicuous by its absence. But studies are being made on such subjects as the cycles of business depressions and why the stock market fluctuates more wildly in the spring than in the fall, to find possible psychical causes or implications. The settlement of great industrial strikes are conditoned not only by hours, wages, living costs, and profits, but also