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Iwant to thank you for the honor of this invitation to give the Karen Horney Memorial Lecture this year. Karen Horney was my first supervisor during my psychoanalytic training in Berlin in the 1920′s. Even at that time, Dr. Horney impressed us students as a psychoanalyst with an open mind, a person willing to listen to the different viewpoints and approaches to human understanding proposed by the various schools of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and sociology. She did not share the dogmatic prejudices of some of her colleagues. When we emigrated to this country, Dr. Horney was the first colleague whose advice I asked in 1938. Since we were settling in Washington, she suggested that I learn what I could from Harry Stack Sullivan, who broadened the scope of psychotherapy to include the treatment of schizophrenia. I followed her advice. From Karen Horney I gained the impression that psychoanalysis was still an expanding pioneer activity on this continent, more so than in Europe. The ingenious system-building of Sigmund Freud had not provided a secure settlement, although the institutionalization of professional skills tends toward standardization and authoritarian crystallization of concepts and theories. In counteracting this process of crystallization, Karen Horney and her followers have stressed forward movement, the advancement of a psychoanalysis destined to expand and open new horizons. Since I believe that it is primarily the creative sympathy of the psychotherapeutic artist that expands the horizon of our vision, I thought some ideas about this might be a suitable topic for a memorial lecture.
The interaction between therapist and patient does more than clarify the cognitive processes that are transmitted mainly by verbal communication; understanding also penetrates the emotional processes that are preponderantly communicated on the pre-verbal level. The participants of the psychoanalytic process often find themselves confused by the interpenetration of