Horney's Heritage

It is Now Ten Years since Karen Horney passed away. Her death after a brief illness on the fourth of December, 1952, left us stunned. Stimulated by her great vitality and occupied with the flow of her new ideas, understandably the idea of her death would have been remote. The memory of those days of sadness, of the feeling of great loss, of the uncertainty of the future is still very vivid in me and undoubtedly is very strong in all of us who were her co-workers and students.

Her last book, Neurosis and Human Growth, presented a concept which reached such a climax of psychological insight that we wondered what could follow such an encompassing vision. Those December days of 1952 made us face the fact that she would add no more to what she had already given us; we would have to look to ourselves for what she would have contributed to the edifice of her theory, had she lived. One thing was clear: Horney, the person, had left us, but not her spirit or her work. We were a group of indebted colleagues who had lost their mentor, but her inspiring personality had given us enough strength to carry on in all the organizations which had served to communicate her teaching.

Horney's impact on her older associates was so strong it moved them to continue where she had left off. The immediate task was to maintain the traditions created by her and to strive for the accomplishment of the tasks which she had planned. There were many who had not been associated with her who doubted that her teaching and the organizations created for the purpose of disseminating and applying her theories, could survive. But, among those who had been her close co-workers, there was no doubt at all. One of my proudest memories is that I, as its President, was able to guide the Association through this critical period. The Karen Horney Memorial Lectures, now an annual event, were inaugurated four months after Karen Horney's death, and from then on they took the place of the annual lecture which she used to