Psychoanalytic Theories of Development and Maldevelopment: Some Recapitulations

I am very pleased to have been asked to deliver this lecture honoring Karen Horney, a psychoanalyst who saw things differently from her teachers and who sought constructively and thoughtfully to eliminate contradictions and inconsistencies in psychoanalytic theory. She was not seeking “to show what was wrong with psychoanalysis, but through eliminating the debatable elements to enable psychoanalysis to develop to the highest of its potentialities.”⁶ In so doing she left behind a heritage from which many in this audience have found guidance in their professional careers. I assume that whatever differences may exist in our orientations, we are united in a devotion to the advancement of our science—to gaining a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of personality functioning and malfunctioning and that herein lies our loyalty, rather than to any school or to any individual. While we respect what our teachers conveyed to us, we would bring no honor to them if we were not constantly alert to what of their teachings no longer serves to guide us effectively, and did not maintain the vitality of psychoanalysis by constant recreation.

Currently, a new discontent has arisen concerning psychoanalysis. It does not derive from resistances to awareness of infantile sexuality or of the force and scope of unconscious motivations as during the early days of psychoanalysis, but from inconsistencies within the theory that cannot be reconciled and from incompatibilities with the biological and behavioral sciences that prevent psychoanalysis from fitting into the corpus of science as a whole. It is difficult for us to alter the theories that have served so well in directing our thinking and our approaches to patients. We are often incapable of observing data that challenge our basic concepts for this engenders anxiety lest our foundations be undermined. Many of us, in our roles as therapists, take refuge in saying that although we disagree with theory, it does not affect the pract