Feminine Psychology: A Review

Students of and workers in psychoanalysis and allied fields should be deeply grateful for the opportunity afforded them by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis when it made these papers on feminine psychology by Karen Horney available.

The members of the Editorial Committee, headed by Dr. Harold Kelman, undertook the huge job of reading, translating, and selecting, from the many articles she wrote on the subject, the fifteen papers presented here. In addition we are fortunate in having an introduction by Dr. Kelman which not only gives us a biographical sketch of Horney and a historical perspective of her contributions in the psychoanalytic movement, but also an overview of the evolving of her ideas on feminine psychology as presented in this volume. (A more complete version of this introduction, entitled “Karen Horney on Feminine Psychology,” by Kelman, may be found in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, 163-183, 1967.) Studying her work, one quickly becomes aware of her differences from Freud in interpreting clinical data. As Kelman writes, “After confronting Freud's male-oriented psychology with her own so-called female psychology, she prepared the way for a philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis of whole people living and interacting with their changing environment.” “In reading these early papers of Dr. Horney, we see a woman of wisdom and experience at work searching for better ways to alleviate human suffering.”

Starting with her paper, “On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,” delivered at the Seventh International Psychoanalytical Congress in Berlin in 1922 and eventually published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, we can see that Horney was concerned with “the consequences of the impact of culture on people, regardless of their sex.” This article has long been a standard reference work for psychoanalysts of all persuasions. In it she granted that the anatomical structure of the female genita