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I have in my possession a letter from Karen Homey, written on May 10, 1950, a few days after a round table discussion on “Psychoanalysis and Character Development in Children,” held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Detroit. This particular event had been arranged by Dr. Horney and her co-workers, and it was with a feeling of pride and with a sense of responsibility that I accepted a cordial invitation to take part in the program. “We all felt,” Dr. Horney said in her note to me, “that barriers were really brought down as people with varying initial orientations focused on one problem in a spirit of search for the truth.”
I had chosen for that occasion the topic: “Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in Personality Development.” Because of the number of distinguished participants, each of whom had a meaningful message, the time limit imposed by necessity called for a terse, condensed presentation. Therefore, when I was honored by the invitation to deliver this year's Karen Horney lecture, I welcomed this distinction as an opportunity to enlarge upon a subject to which, primarily in the area of psychoanalysis and more broadly in the general field of psychiatry, Dr. Horney had made an impressive contribution.
One does not have to be an expert historian to be aware of an age-old—and as yet unsolved—dilemma which has troubled philosophers and physicians and which has been, and still is, responsible for the “varying initial orientations” referred to by Dr. Horney.
The dilemma has arisen from the basic inability to find a clearly perceived link between the propensities residing within an individual—which may be termed his inherent destiny—and those influences which come upon him from beyond the boundaries of the self. The search has been going on for at least two-and-a-half millennia. It is fascinating to see how, until considerably less than one century ago, there was a prevailing tendency to dismiss all perplexities by viewing