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This book is a compendium of original articles which have appeared over the last seventeen years in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. The aims of this collection are to show Horney's work as evolving from Freud's ideas; to delineate her distinct advances in character analysis; to demonstrate the fruitfulness of her ideas through the contributions of her students and her colleagues in the areas of self-realization, moral values, conflict experience, sexuality and character, childhood development, psychosomatic illness and anxiety phenomena. Evolving concepts of technique follow from the elaboration of her growth-centered theory.
In his introduction, Harold Kelman gives a terse and lucid summary of the evolution of Horney's ideas up to and including her last book, Neurosis and Human Growth . He shows how she confronted the male psychology epitomized in the statement “Anatomy is destiny” first with a kind of female psychology as a corrective, and then transcended this limitation and prepared for a psychology and philosophy of the whole person. The introduction is a welcome and helpful preparation for the articles that follow.
Horney's holistic approach is well portrayed in the two articles she published after her last book. The first tackles a specific character attitude or defense—feeling abused. In her exploration of the sources, functions and values of this attitude, Horney weaves a tapestry of intricate interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics that clearly illustrates the individual's total involvement in feeling abused as a way of life. She sees it as a centrifugal flight from the self in which the person experiences himself as the innocent victim. There is an increasing self-elimination and a spotlighting of the abuser. Analysis is experienced by such a person as a victimization which he enters reluctantly and only with polite interest. The “abused victim” perpetuates his neurosis by this character attitude and blocks off any possible awareness of himself. Hor