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On January 30, 1953, at the New York Academy of Medicine, the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy held a Memorial Meeting for Karen Horney at which Dr. Paul Lussheimer was the speaker. Dr. Emil A. Gutheil, President of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, made the following introductory remarks.
The scientific spirit has always been a spirit of adventure and innovation, and progress has been stimulated by some forms
of disillusionment over existing conditions.
No one approach in psychiatric thinking is in a position to claim that it knows all the answers. The expansion in the field of psychiatric theory and practice must be multidimensional. The existence of many schools of thought is not only acceptable, but desirable. Each of the many trends may—and should—continue and expand as far as it can go with its own contributions, while appraising critically and assimilating validated contributions of others. Most of the modern schools of psychiatric thought have achieved their success by illuminating some aspects of psychiatry; and they may reasonably hope to make additional contributions as time goes on. To claim that any one of the existing schools can do this job alone, and will in future continue to do so, must ultimately lead to disappointment.
In psychotherapy, the need for reforms is great. This need is conditioned not only by economic and social factors, but also, to a large extent, by clinical development.
The standard type of psychoanalysis, with all its stringent adherence to theory and all its ritualism, shows marked deficiencies at the (so important) therapeutic end; deficiencies which have caused a number of dissentions and deviations from the original method.
In 1939, Karen Horney voiced her concern about the situation this way: “My desire to make a critical reevaluation of psychoanalytic theories had its origin in a dissatisfaction with therapeutic results. I have found that almost every patient offered problems for which our acc