Anxiety Revisited

Over a decade ago, in preparing a survey of various advances in psychoanalytic theory and therapy for my textbook Practice of Dynamic Psychiatry, I wrote the following:

“The School of Karen Horney: Karen Horney came from Berlin to the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute soon after it was founded by Franz Alexander in 1931, but within a few years disagreed with Alexander's views (then essentially Freudian) and left to organize her own Institute in New York. Her writings, particularly The Neurotic Personality of Our Time in 1937, and New Ways in Psychoanalysis in 1939, have had wide popular appeal, partially because, in contrast to those of Adler, Jung, and Rank, they are clear, nontechnical, and have a refreshing awareness of cultural and economic influences in the life of the individual. In this sense they represent [a current] reaction to the narrower concepts of [other] analytic schools which sometimes treat the patient as though he were a preconceived, isolated abstraction living in vacuo or, at most, a perpetual child forever dealing only with the shadows of his past,…

“Horney defines neurosis [culturally] as (a) term of social opprobrium [frequently pejorative] applied to any set of unconventional [patterns of] behavior, or (b) failure to fulfill one's [latent] potentialities. What is called ‘neurotic’ is therefore both the result of social stress and the cause of it, since the neurotic eventually creates adverse circumstances for himself and is then further affected by them in a vicious cycle. Horney agrees that the root of all neurosis is anxiety, and endorses Freud's revised formulation that anxiety causes inhibition of satisfaction, rather than that ‘repressed instincts’ cause anxiety.”

I then proceeded to review Horney's theories and techniques in a way that needs no restatement for this audience, and concluded with the following comment:

“[Later in life] her thinking became colored by the intuition and faith [as she confided personally to me] that mankind, guide