Horneyan Developmental Psychoanalytic Theory and its Application to the Treatment of the Young

It is especially fitting that the Thirty-First Annual Karen Horney Memorial Lecture be given by Dr. John Bowlby. His interest and world renowned work in the area of attachment is related to some of the most basic ideas that Dr. Karen Horney introduced into the psychoanalytic movement. Each of these individuals worked in the complex area of the importance of early human relations, but from quite different vantage points. Dr. Bowlby has relied on the direct observation of children's reactions in defined situations, and has intensively integrated his work with that in the fields of ethology, control theory, human information processing, and cognitive psychology in order to shed new light on personality development, both healthy and pathological. He has, in effect, studied prospectively what most psychoanalysts including Dr. Horney have theorized about in retrospect. That is, most psychoanalysts, and especially the early pioneers, worked exclusively with adults. The insights gained by way of the psychoanalytic method led them to theorize, sometimes with uncanny accuracy, about early life events that mold future character development. The results were far from complete, and researchers such as Dr. Bowlby began to fill in the great gaps in our understanding of human psychological development.

Both Drs. Horney and Bowlby share the position of having radically rejected traditional drive theory as the basis for human motivation and development. Since in this traditional psychoanalytic model, or what some call the psychical energy model, human motivations centered around gratification of the instinctual drives, relations with people, known as objects, were important only insofar as they gratified or frustrated drives. By rejecting this