Horney's Conception of the Basic Conflict Applied to Child Psychiatry

The Opportunity afforded me to give the Fourth Karen Horney Lecture is an honor of unusual significance. This annual event is but one medium to nourish and keep alive the memory and contribution of a great student of human behavior. More than many students of her time, she perceived the individual not just as a biological isolate, or as a product and a precipitate of the forces operating in and around him. She saw man as an interacting organism achieving individuality in a world of people and events. She avoided the extremes of viewing the individual as in conflict with his own instinctual and unconscious urges, or as one with little control of his own destiny because of the forces of the culture. She has made a lasting contribution, integrating divergent concepts on the nature of the growing-up process. Her discriminating insight into the importance of a balanced point of view has advanced our understanding of how man uses the social forces to achieve a sense of his own significance and thus give deeper meaning to those forces emanating from himself.

The science of man has been advanced by the creative dissenters who, being dissatisfied with rigid determinism of their times, sought to question some of the established traditions, practices and theories and thus plow the ground for the ever-new and give more meaning to current concepts. Meyer was a great dissenter from the rigid disease-entity concepts of his day. He introduced the broader concept of reaction patterns and viewed the individual as a psycho-biological integrate. He laid the foundations for a more humanistic psychiatry when he viewed growth “as the differentiation of live people”1 and helped to break the shackles of a rigid, constitutional, deterministic point of view. He saw the individual in terms of his own life history, an “experiment of nature,” with a new self emerging as a biological and social integrate. He went beyond the “instinct theory.” Freud was a great rebel and, by introducing his challen