The Psychoanalyst as a Person

Being asked to be the 25th Annual Karen Horney Lecturer has a special significance for me because Dr. Horney exercised a decisive influence upon my development during a critical period in my psychoanalytic career. Her classic book The Neurotic Personality of Our Time came out in 1937,3 about nine months after I had begun my psychoanalytic training. It had an electric effect upon me! Her descriptions of neurotic patterns had an intensity and clarity of meaning that the classical libido-oriented views that I was being taught at the time totally failed to convey.

Thus it was not accidental that I sought Karen Horney out as my first psychoanalytic supervisor as soon as the opportunity arose. I still see her clearly in my mind's eye—outwardly calm, yet with a burning inner intensity and concentration that rendered her deeply perceptive and sensitive to the smallest nuance in the clinical material I was presenting to her. My work with her had an important impact on my own method of practice. When I began, I was doing what most young analysts tend to do, namely, modeling my analytic behavior on what I was being taught at the Psychoanalytic Institute and on what I was experiencing in my own didactic analysis. Thus, I was studiously withdrawn and silent with patients and careful not to reveal any emotion—trying very hard to achieve the impersonal, mirror-like model that Sigmund Freud had prescribed in his papers on technique. I didn't know at that time that this was a model that Freud himself breached far more than he practiced! My work with Horney gave me the freedom to break out of that rigid mold, to be interactively human with my patients without relinquishing the role of the objective observer and commentator, and to be warm without being seductive. She was the first to make me aware of the fact (now common knowledge, but revolutionary at that time) that psychoanalysis involves considerably more than the giving of cognitive interpretations and that the way we interact as